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•By 

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M. A. Donohue SSL Co. 



407 



429 DEARBORN ST. 

OHIOAQO 



Standard American 

PERFECTION 

POULTRY BOOK 



Describing All of the Different Varieties of Fowls, 

Their Points of Beauty and Their 

Merits as Setters 



By I. K. FELCH 



The Recognized American Authority on Poultry Matters 
and Author of " Poultry Culture." 



..."••.. 



¥ 



CHICAGO: 

M. A. DONOHUE & COMPANY 

407-429 Dearborn St. 



Copyright 1902 

M. A. DONOHUE & CO. 






M. A. DONOHUE A CO., PRINTERS AND BINOERS, CHICAGO. 






oi v 






CONTENTS. 



PART L— POULTRY CULTURE. 



CHAPTER I. 

INTRODUCTION. 

Poultry culture as a farm product — Census of 1870 — 
Mr. Mansfield's Experiment — Poultry and egg 
production a source of wealth to the people — 
Statistics presented to the Chicago Convention, 
1878 — Startling Facts — France — Belgium i 3 

CHAPTER II. 

DESCRIPTION OF FAVORITE BREEDS. 

Light Brahmas — Plymouth Rocks — Wyandottes— 
Brown Leghorns — Langshans — Silver-Spangled 
Hamburgs — Black Spanish — Houdans — Par- 
tridge-Cochins — Black-breasted Red Games, etc. 23 

CHAPTER III. 

TYPE IN BREEDING AND STRAINS OF LIGHT BRAHMAS, 

Americans lovers of beauty — The well bred form a 
line of " good ones " — We like strong blood — Con- 
stitution and vital force — The Strains of Light 
Brahmas — The Burnham Strain — The Rankin 
Strain— The Philadelphia Strain— The Autocrat 
Strain — Duke of York — The Chamberlin Strain, 
now widely known as the " Felch Strain " 37 

3 



4 CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER IV. 

DISCUSSION OF MASSACHUSETTS BOARD OF 
AGRICULTURE. 

Secretary Flint, Mr. Felch, Mr. Hersey and Mr. 
Cheever discuss the whole question of Poultry 
Culture 67 

CHAPTER V. 
ON THE TREATMENT OF BREEDING-STOCK. 

The necessity of watchfulness — The best hatching 
time from May 20 to June 10 — Cockerels safest 
for winter breeding — The influence of feed on 
color — We can assist nature very materially 83 

CHAPTER VI. 

LOCATION. 

The location healthy for man will generally be so for 
poultry — Light soils good — The land needs cul- 
tivating — The early bird catching the worm — If 
the land be poor keep the horse-hoe at work — 
Poultry culture requires eternal vigilance 91 

CHAPTER VII. 

BUILDINGS AND FURNISHINGS. 

An open shed protected from storm and wind — Plan 
of building suggested — Special provision of tar 
felting for cold sections — Avoid box-nests — 
Roosts longwise — Nail kegs useful — Model coop 
for twenty chickens — Coops for Village use — 
Buildings for incubation set apart — Hatching 
chickens — Chicken-house — Brooder — Every cor- 
ner a death trap , 97 



CONTENTS. 5 

CHAPTER VIII. 

FEED AND CARE OF FOWLS. 

.rhe kind of food suitable — Foraging by the flocks^ 
Be careful to maintain an even animal heat — 
Good food preserves the plumage — Great need 
of ventilation 125 

CHAPTER IX. 

FROM SHELL TO GRIDDLE. 

Importance of regularity in feeding — Bill of fare — 
Corn — Wheat — Barley — Oats — Beans — Excelsior 
meal — Keep the food sweet — Milk is a whole food 
— Beware of distemper — Have some clover 129 

CHAPTER X. 

ARTIFICIAL INCUBATION. 

Artificial Incubation first successful in 1884 — The 
" Year "—The " Machine "—The Incubator needs 
careful operation — Careful study required — Incu- 
bators cannot be made self-regulating — Monarch 
Incubator — Mr.Rankin's experiment — 3,000 ducks 
raised — Mr. Buffington's experiment 140 

CHAPTER XI. 

DISEASES OF FOWLS. 

Their medical treatment — Fungus in the blood — Dis- 
temper — Roup — Chicken-pox — Diphtheria — The 
red spider louse — Diarrhoea — Treatment 149 



YOUNG FOLKS' 

DIALOGUES AND DRAMAS 

A collection of original Dialogues and Dramas, by- 
Edith Brown-Evarts and others. They are new, original, 
sprightly and sensible and particularly adapted for young 
people from ten to eighteen years old, on subjects and ideas 
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appropriate action can be rendered very successfully. 
The dramas are short, pithy and funny, while the dialogues 
are suitable for all occasions, such as special day cele- 
brations, etc. This is without doubt the best dialogue 
book published. 

Paper covers 25 cents. 

Cloth 50 cents. 



AMERICAN STANDARD 

PERFECTION POULTRY BOOK 

By I. K. Felch, author of " Poultry Culture," the rec- 
ognized standard work in poultry in America, adopted 
by many Poultry Associations in this country. It con- 
tains a complete description of all the varieties of fowls, 
including turkeys, ducks and geese. 

Many old-fashioned farmers are inclined to discredit 
the statement that there is money in poultry. Why? Be- 
cause they are not up to the new and improved ideas in 
poultry management. A little trial of the rules laid down 
in this book will soon dispel all misgivings in this direction, 
and tend to convince the most skeptical that there is money 
in poultry-keeping. This book contains double the num- 
ber of illustrations found in any similar work published. 

It is the best and cheapest Poultry Book on the market. 

Paper covers 25 cents. 

Cloth 50 cents. 



All books sent postpaid to any address in the United 
States, Canada or Mexico upon receipt of price in currency, 
stamps, postal or express money order. 

M. A. DONOHUE ®. CO. 

4-07-429 -Dearborn St. Jw CHICAGO 



PART I 



CHAPTER I. 



INTRODUCTION. 

IN 1873 we made our maiden speech on '■ POULTRY 
Culture as a Farm Product." We shall never 
forget the look of incredulity and surprise depicted 
on the faces of the four hundred farmers who listened 
to us on that occasion. The following is the substance 
cf that speech : 

Although the poultry interest of the nation has 
been considered of minor importance, yet when we in- 
vestigate we find the egg and poultry product to be 
much larger than any other agricultural product or 
industry, and we become amazed at the amount of 
wealth annually accumulated by practical poultry keep- 
ing. 

The census for 1870 informs us that the cotton crop 
was 3,01 1,996 bales ; the corn crop, 761,000,000 bushels; 
the wheat crop, 288,000,000 bushels; the value of all the 
cattle, sheep, and swine slaughtered or sold to be slaugh- 
tered was $398,956,376; the hay crop, 28,000,000 tons, 
valued at $14 (a high estimate), was $384,000,000. 

The assertion that the egg and poultry produce of 
the States exceeds either of these large products is 

13 



14 POULTRY CULTURE. 

met with derision ; yet it is true, and the produce finds 
no rival save in the entire meat and dairy products com- 
bined. 

Compute the nine millions of families in the States 
as consuming but two dozen eggs per week, and twenty 
dollars' worth of poultry per year, and we have (com- 
puting eggs at twenty-five cents per dozen) over $405,- 
000,000. Nor is this all. Large as it is, to it must be 
added the consumption by the saloons, restaurants, 
confectionery establishments, our thousands of hotels, 
together with the medicinal and chemical and exporta- 
tion demands, which will swell the amount to not less 
than five hundred millions of dollars as the annual prod- 
uct of the United States ; an interest worthy of our 
considerate investigation. When we commence to 
make figures, we become surprised at their magnitude; 
and that you may not underrate the hotel consumption, 
you have only to consult the encyclopedias to learn 
that the hotels consumed sixty-two millions four hun- 
dred and eighty-three thousand dollars' worth of eggs 
and poultry for the year 1879. There must, of course, 
have been a great increase since that time. 

The consumption of meat to each guest per day at 
the Grand Pacific, the proprietor of the hotel informs 
us, is $2.50, and two-thirds of that amount is for poult- 
ry, game and eggs. Another item should be consid- 
ered in this connection, and that is, thousands of prairie 
farmers, who live so remote as to make the running of 
meat-wagons unprofitable, are obliged to rely on their 
farms for fresh meat, and it is a fact that two-thirds of 
it is poultry and eggs. It is the custom with them in 
early winter to kill and pack in snow and ice the sup- 



POULTRY CULTURE. 15 

plies of poultry for home use. This, with the richer 
third of the population who consume far more than the 
estimate offered, will more than make up for the poor 
of our eastern cities, who consider poultry a luxury 
and seldom indulge in its use. With these items as 
data, we claim our estimate of five hundred millions to 
be far less, rather than more, than the actual yearly 
product, which, as we have said, makes the industry of 
poultry breeding and keeping one of the largest in 
which our farmers are interested. Like in comparison 
as the giant oak to its acorn origin is this large product, 
made up from the small collections from the small flocks 
of fowls seen about the doors of the hamlet and farmhouse 
in numbers of twelve, twenty, thirty and fifty, and where 
a larger number is seen so rarely that they become the 
exception. These flocks pay a large profit on their 
cost of production, as may be seen by consulting the 
different societies' reports. In 1858, we see that thirty- 
eight fowls, kept in small yards, under unfavorable 
circumstances, with a market at thirty-eight cents for 
corn, sixteen and two-thirds cents for eggs, and fifteen 
cents per pound for poultry, yielded a net profit of 
$1.38 per head. In 1861, Mr. Mansfield's experiment 
with one hundred hens, having a free range of the 
farm, consuming but ninety-three bushels of corn or its 
equivalent, produced one hundred and forty-seven eggs 
each (no chickens being raised that year), and yielded a 
net profit on eggs alone of $1.35 per head ; to which, 
had the value of the guano been added, the figures 
would have reached the sum of $1.60. These and 
other statements are to be found in the Middlesex 
South Society's reports, of $2, $2.25 and $2.50 per head 



16 POULTRY CULTURE. 

profit per annum ; and last, but not least, the banner 
statement of Mr. Whitman in 1873. With fifty-one 
Leghorns, which laid two hundred and seven eggs each, 
which he sold for thirty-one cents per dozen, the cost 
of keeping the fowls being $1.13 each, he shows a profit 
of $4.04 per head, proving conclusively that these 
small flocks pay much better with care than do other 
farm stock. 

We have no reason to change our opinion, for 
the amount must be increasing each year. We as 
a nation are consuming more poultry and eggs every 
year. We are not alone in our belief of the magnitude 
or in our faith in the future of this immense in- 
terest or industry, and we subjoin from the pen of the 
able writer, Captain J. E. White, an article on the 
future capabilities of the country in poultry breeding 
as compared with other countries. 

POULTRY AND EGG PRODUCTION — A SOURCE OF 
WEALTH TO THE PEOPLE. 

France is, perhaps, the only nation that recognizes 
the poultry and egg trade as a source of wealth to its 
people, and protects and encourages it as it would any 
other business which brings a revenue to, and betters 
the financial condition of, its citizens. Under this fos- 
tering care the poultry and egg trade of that country 
has grown year by year until it has reached gigantic 
proportions — not only meeting the demands made 
upon it for home consumption, but also supplying 
English markets with more than $13,000,000 worth of 
this class of food annually. The value of eggs and 
poultry sold in home markets and consumed by the 



POULTRY CULTURE. 17 

French people is estimated at $i 10,000,000 ; add to 
this the exports to England and we have $123,000,000, 
which represents an industry that is looked upon by 
too many of our farmers and business men as being 
"too insignificant to merit consideration." It must be 
borne in mind that this $123,000,000 represents only 
the eggs and poultry consumed annually — it does not 
include the stock carried over to begin business upon 
the following year. The value of the stock on hand — 
which is carried over for the purpose mentioned — is 
estimated at about $45,000,000, thus showing that the 
annual poultry and egg production of France amounts 
to $168,000,000. 

Doubtless most of those who may read this article 
will conclude — when they reach this point — that no 
other nation is as productive in this particular as the 
French, but the facts, supported by reasonable estimates, 
demonstrate that the United States are vastly more so. 
"In 1878 a convention of butter, cheese and egg pro- 
ducers was held in Chicago ; the most careful and relia- 
ble statistical reports that could be gathered relating 
to these products were placed before this convention ; 
from them we find that the annual production of eggs 
was valued at $180,000,000, and poultry sold at $70, 
000,000." Thus, according to this report, which I shall 
presently show to be incorrect, $250,000,000 were 
annually realized from a business " too insignificant to 
merit consideration." To some it will sound like one of 
Munchausen's stories, but to those who arc in the busi- 
ness and understand something of its magnitude, it 
seems like a too modest tale ; it does not tell half the 
story. The population of the United States is more 



18 POULTRY CULTURE. 

than fifty millions. If each one of this population were 
to eat an egg to-day there would be consumed in eggs 
alone, at the present market price, $1,000,000; and if 
each one were to eat an egg each day for a year, the 
consumption of this one article of food would amount 
in the aggregate to $365,000,000; add to this the value 
of the poultry consumed, which is estimated at $121,- 
666,648, and it will be seen that the eggs and poultry 
consumed in the United States annually represent a 
money value of $486,666,648 ; add to this $45,000,000, 
the value of the stock carried over, and to this the 
sum realized from sales of fancy fowls and eggs, which 
is not less than $500,000 annually, and you have the 
enormous sum of $532,166,648, which is $32,000,000 
more than the value of the corn crop of the United 
States for 1879, anc * $189842,857 more than the wheat 
crop of the same year. But some " doubting Thomas" 
will say that there are thousands of our people who do 
not eat an egg each day. Granting this to be true, we 
must face the fact that many other thousands eat from 
two to four daily, and that eggs enter very largely into 
the composition of many articles of food which we con- 
sume each day, such as cakes, pies, salads, coffee, 
custards and puddings; and we must not neglect to 
include in our account the eggs used in saloons, and for 
medicinal and chemical purposes. 

Perhaps there are few of our professional men, 
clerks and merchants, who, when they run like wild 
men to a restaurant and order a cup of coffee and a 
piece of pie, stop to think that when they have finished 
their lunch they have rendered unfit for incubation twc 
or three eggs ; but such is the fact. Then we are nol 



POULTRY CULTURE. 19 

so certain that there are many thousands of our people 
who do not consume eggs or poultry in some form 
daily. We might jump to the conclusion that our 
poorer classes could not afford it ; but it would be a 
jump in the wrong direction, for whoever has traveled 
and been ordinarily observant has noticed that the poor 
almost always keep poultry. This estimate is based 
upon the supposition that the average price of eggs, 
the year round, is but twenty-four cents per dozen ; and 
this supposition, I venture to say, is not sustained by 
the facts, because at most times in the year — during 
the winter, fall and latter part of summer — they bring, 
in our own markets, from thirty-five to fifty cents per 
dozen, and in eastern markets from fifty to sixty-five 
cents, the price, of course, depending upon the -upply 
and demand. Many of the eastern hotels make con- 
tracts with those who keep large flocks of fowls to 
furnish them so many dozen of eggs and so many 
pounds of dressed poultry daily, and pay for these eggs, 
in consideration of their being fresh laid, from forty to 
sixty cents per dozen. 

STARTLING FACTS. 

We are further indebted to Mr. James E. White for 
the following array of facts, which will be read with 
great interest : 

If France, with an area of 204,147 square miles, of 
which only 98,460 is capable of cultivation, realizes 
more than $200,000,000 annually from her poultry in- 
terests, it can easily be seen that the United States, 
with an area of 3,587,681 square miles, of which 1,700,- 
000 is capable of cultivation, should with the same care 



20 POULTRY CULTURE. 

and labor realize from the same source $3,264,000,000 
annually. . But, of course, in order to make the con- 
ditions equal, it would be necessary for the United 
States to be as densely populated as France. 

The present population of that country is 38,905,- 
788, which would give each individual — if an equal 
division of the land was made — two acres of soil 
capable of cultivation ; whereas, the population of the 
United States is 55,000,000, which, under the same 
allotment, would give about twenty acres of good land 
to each inhabitant ; hence, this country. is as capable of 
sustaining a population of 550,000,000 as France is of 
sustaining her present population, and if the produc- 
tion per capita only equals that of France, the sum 
total annually would be $3,264,000,000. But it has 
been shown that the production and consumption of 
this class of food is much larger per capita than it is in 
France, and if each citizen of the United States con- 
sumes as much of this food when our population 
reaches 550,000,000 as they now do, the annual value of 
this industry will not be less than $5,596,000,000. 

It will be remarked by those who have not given 
t.he food supply of this country thoughtful consider- 
ation, or the ultimate population and productiveness 
that attention which it deserves, that the writer of this 
article is visionary and enthusiastic; but, my friends, if 
you look over the figures carefully you will see that the 
probable extent of this industry, when this country is 
fully developed, is capable of a correct mathematical 
solution, and is made on the basis that if 55,000,000 
people eat so much in one year, how much will 550,- 
000,000 eat in the same time ? 



POULTRY CULTURE. 21 

Belgium is one of the smallest powers in Europe ; 
its area is 11,373 square miles, and its population is 
about 5,253,821. It is the most densely populated 
country in the whole world, and about 60 per cent of 
its area is under the most exhaustive cultivation, that 
being all of it that io capable of producing good crops. 
In order that the extent of the country may be more 
fully understood, it may be well to mention the fact 
that it is not nearly as large as the state of Georgia, 
while its population is more than three times greater ; 
and this little country produces annually, as shown in the 
statistics of that country, 274,967,824 eggs — or forty- 
eight eggs for each man, woman and child in Belgium ; 
and this is accomplished in a country " where the most 
persistent effort is made to cause the land to produce the 
food necessary for home consumption, and where a vast 
amount of labor and money is expended in the cultiva- 
tion of the soil." 

If such results are obtained under such unfavorable 
circumstances, what may not be accomplished in a 
country as favorably situated as ours ? 

It is the duty of all men who have the development 
of this country at heart to encourage the greatest 
possible production of every commodity that we can 
produce with profit, and amon^ other industries the 
poultry and egg business must not be neglected. The 
farmers must be made to understand that the thorough- 
bred fowls are as much superior to the barn-yard fowls 
as the Herefords, Jerseys and Anguses are to the com- 
mon cattle that roam over our prairies ; and when they 
understand this, they will improve their fowls. 



22 POULTRY CULTURE. 

Much more could be quoted to show the magnitude 
and the need of the development of this industry as a 
source of wealth to the nation, but above all this, 
farmers of America, remember that poultry-keeping 
has more than a money value for you. Interest your 
boys in it v for thereby they learn many of the princi- 
ples that underlie the successful breeding of stock, — 
fitting them, when older, the better to manage cattle 
and horses. The rapid production of chickens enables 
them to try as many experiments in a few years as 
would take a lifetime with stock. In the breeding of 
fowls they learn that like produces like more surely, 
and only, as a rule, where the stock is bred in line, and 
that to produce chickens uniform in type and color 
they must have, in both sire and dam, a preponderance 
of the blood of the desired type ; they must mate kin- 
dred blood judiciously, avoiding too close relationship, 
— for by mating fowls of one blood for three genera- 
tions we produce sterile eggs. They learn that pre- 
potency of sire is more marked in the mating of 
kindred blood, and in the offspring of dams of weak 
constitution, and when appearing in the coupling of 
radically different blood, that it is an exception and 
not the rule. They learn that the blood most difficult 
to subjugate, in the end has more lasting quality, and 
does the flock the most good as a new infusion of 
blood ; these interests, once awakened, cannot slumber; 
the boys become thoughtful, and as they grow older 
their assistance becomes much more valuable than any 
help you can hire. 



CHAPTER II, 



DESCRIPTION OF FAVORITE BREEDS. 



WHILE we show several experiments in our in~ 
troduction, we may affirm that all the different 
breeds will pay a handsome profit, if furnished quarters 




LIGHT BRAHMAS. 

suitable for their condition, and properly cared for; 
and, generally, it is best for the breeder to make a 
specialty of the kind his taste shall dictate. But with 
our thirty years' experience with all the so-called thor- 

23 



24 POULTRY CULTURE. 

oughbred varieties, we are led to advise, taking into 
consideration the individual merit and associate worth, 
the selection of Light Brahmas, Leghorns, Wyandottes 
and Plymouth Rocks, for they will be found to pay 
the best for extra care, for all practical uses. 

The Brahma is a superior winter layer, producing the 
larger number of her eggs from October to May. As 
poultry, the chicks have to be killed quite young, — say 
eight to ten weeks old, as broilers ; the most profitable 




PLYMOUTH ROCKS. 



time as roasters being at eight months. This makes 
them late as poultry, but to make up for it in a meas- 
ure, the virgin cocks are tender enough for roasting at 
even twelve to thirteen months, more so than the 
native at seven or eight months. If the males be sepa- 
rated from the females when five months old and fed 
through till March, when poultry meat invariably ad- 
vances in price, the breeder will find them sought for 
by hotel and restaurant keepers, to supply the place of 



POULTRY CULTURE. 25 

turkeys, and that they will sell at a price of only about 
five cents per pound less than capons. 

The Plymouth Rocks are good average layers, and 
in them the poulterer finds an excellent breed from 
which to produce broilers and summer roasters for our 
seaside or all summer resorts. In round numbers, ten 
dozen eggs per year is about what they will each lay, and 
hatch and raise you a brood of chickens, and in this case 



WYANDOTTES. 

the brood is gratis, for they will lay less eggs, we think, 
if deprived of the privilege of indulging in the natural 
instinct of reproduction. 

So long as the breeder of Plymouth Rocks will be 
content to have them occupy this middle ground be- 
tween the larger and smaller breeds, and endeavor to 
increase by breeding to that end the production of 
large eggs, they will hold their position of favor against 
all rivals. 



26 POULTRY CULTURE. 

The Wyandottes of late have come in for public 
praise and patronage. They are in the same class with 
Plymouth Rocks, and become their greatest com- 
petitors. Their breeders claim for them par excellence 
as broilers, and the merit of being better layers. In this 
we would, perhaps, accept the fact that their eggs are 
larger, but we fear they will not lay as many. What 
they may develop into in the coming years cannot be 
foretold. While we would admit them as equals, we 




BROWN LEGHORNS. 

are not yet ready to accept them as superior to their 
blue rivals. They are shorter jointed, more blocky, in 
some cases, and if they settle down to this as a uniform 
type, and a close-feathered, fine-boned race, they cer- 
tainly will deserve the boom they are at this writing 
receiving. 

The Leghorns are a non-sitting variety, and one of 
the largest producers of eggs, being most prolific during 
the warmer months. Their chickens make nice early, 



POULTRY CULTURE. 27 

though small, broilers, and should be killed as such, for 
as roasters their skin is tough and carcass too small, 
their chief merit being in egg production alone. They 
are very quick growers, many pullets commencing to 
lay at four months and a-half old, and there are cases 
on record in our own yard where they have laid at 
three months and three weeks old. We have also 
started with eggs and produced three generations in 
three hundred and sixty-three days. This precocity 



LANGSHANS. 



enables one to raise his stock birds even after the sea- 
son is too far advanced to rear successfully the larger 
varieties. 

Of the above we consider the Brahma the best of 
all the Asiatic breeds. The Langshan will lay an egg 
as large, and perhaps as many of them, and of the 
same desirable color of shell, but their white skin 
drives them into a second-rate poultry, as judged by 



28 POULTRY CULTURE. 

the New England demand for golden yellow carcasses 
when dressed. 

The Plymouth Rocks and Wyandottes, and we may 
add possibly for purely practical use the Dominique, are 
breeds to fill the middle ground, and from which to 
look for the broiler supply, and the Leghorns to give us 
the largest number of eggs in a year, and to produce 
them in the larger numbers at the time our incubating 
breeds are busy with the rearing of their chickens. 

Thus you see how peculiarly adapted one to the 
other the four breeds are, and all of them are hardy, 
standing much neglect. With them the farmer easily 
caters to the wants of the markets the year round. 

With the above breeds as stock the yearly product 
will average one hundred and fifty eggs and eight 
chickens to each hen, which will sell (taking Natick 
market for 1885 as a basis) as follows: 

12^ dozen eggs, at 25 cents per dozen $312 

4 pairs of chickens, 28 lbs., at 25 cents per lb 7 00 

American guano , 25 

Total , . . . $10 37 

The cost of producing the same being : 

Keeping of hen $1 15 

15 eggs for incubation 38 

Cost of growing 8 chicks to 35 lbs. live weight, at 9^ cents 

per pound — 3 32 

Interest on investment and casualties 60 

Total $5 45 

These figures may seem high, but for the last ten 
years the same market has averaged from 31 to 32^ 
cents per dozen for eggs, and grain has ruled very 
much lower. 



POULTRY CULTURE. 29 

To notice some of the other breeds, we will say " the 
Hamburg family " is one of merit as egg producers, 
yielding about one hundred and sixty-five eggs per 
year, as a rule ; and there is a case on record where a 
single hen of the Golden-Spangled variety laid one 
hundred and fifty-one eggs in six months. As poultry, 
the meat and bones are dark, so much so as not to be 
desired by market-men. The race is delicate, and hard 
to rear, but when six or eight months old seems to 
have become quite hardy, except it be a predisposition 




SILVER SPANGLED HAMBURGS. 



to the disease called " black comb," but why the disease 
should be so termed we cannot understand. To be 
sure, the comb turns black, but the causes come from 
derangement of the egg-producing organs. We have 
seen them lie down, their combs become black, and 
they, to all appearance, dead, when all at once they 
would expel the egg, and in a few moments be singing 
about the yard as well as ever. 

The different varieties of this family are Golden- 
Spangle, Golden-Penciled, Silver-Spangle, Silver-Pen- 



30 POULTRY CULTURE. 

ciled, — this last being the old-time Bolton Gray, under 
which name it was first imported into this country. 
The white and black varieties are of more recent date 
than the first four named ; the black we think the 
most hardy and prolific of them all. 

The Spanish was long known as one of the best 
layers, and in fact the old Minorcas were in every 
respect equal to the Leghorns, but the breeding of the 
white face upon this breed has resulted in the fact that 
much of their merit has been sacrificed. Their eggs 



BLACK SPANISH. 

are larger than those of any other breed, but in num- 
ber they fall much behind the average. They are 
extremely delicate as chicks, but when once matured 
they seem reasonably hardy ; and the contrast of a pure 
white face and ear-lobe with their metallic, green-black 
plumage makes them much admired. As poultry, 
here in America, we would not concede, perhaps, that 
they were up to the average. Their dark legs and 
white meat are not preferred by the masses. 



POULTRY CULTURE. 31 

The Dominique is every way equal in merit as to 
number of eggs, and in poultry equally as good, as the 
Plymouth Rock ; it being rather under size compels it 
to take a second place. In all other points, what has 
been said for the Plymouth Rocks would apply to the 
Dominique. 

The French class, comprising Houdans, LaFleche 
and Creve Cceur, while highly appreciated in France, 
have failed to give general satisfaction in New Eng- 
land. But Mr. Aldrich, of Hyde Park, has been 




HOUDANS. 

**dccessful with the Houdans, and claims for them all 
that is excellent as table fowls, besides being a good 
average producer of eggs ; they are more inclined to 
non-sitting than otherwise. But the Houdan and 
Creve Cceur require warm, dry quarters. They, like 
the Polish, are inclined to roup if confined in damp 
quarters. 

The LaFleche are the most delicate to rear of the 
^vhole class, and in our northern climate are much 



32 



POULTRY CULTURE. 



troubled with a weakness in their limbs. A good 
healthy hen of this breed, we believe, will lay more 
eggs from March to October than any other breed, not 
excepting the Leghorn. 

The Cochins are, in England, much preferred. They 
are good mothers, being covered with long, fluffy 
feathers. They are hardy, and as layers in winter are 




PARTRIDGE COCHINS. 



hard to excel. Their eggs are furnished with a thick 
shell, and in closely bred birds are extremely hard to 
hatch. There are the Partridge, Buff, White, and 
Black varieties, all having their admirers, the Partridge 
being the most beautiful, while the Black has undoubt- 
edly the most merit, for they are good layers and fine 



POULTRY CULTURE. 33 

poultry. For one dollar " The American Standard of 
Excellence" can be obtained, which gives a full de- 
scription of the different breeds. 

We shall give special attention to description, as to 
color and type, under the head of " Judging." 

The game varieties find many admirers, and for a 
juicy broiler or a roaster under six months old, and 
as the mothers of chicks, they have no equal ; for the 
latter, however, we think the cross of a game cock on 




BLACK-BREASTED RED GAMES. 



a Partridge-Cochin hen pretty and serviceable, as they 
are more apt to receive all chicks given them to rear. 
The pure game, while very jealous of the care of her 
own, is death to all orphans or chickens not hatched by 
her. The games cannot be said to be first-class layers, 
as 128 eggs is all we can concede they will produce in 
a year in small flocks, and if too much crowded they 
will fall short of these figures. The Bantams, many of 



34 POULTRY CULTURE. 

them, lay more and greater weight of eggs in proportion 
to their own weight than do the larger breeds. Were 
eggs sold by weight, as they should be, we believe the 
Brahmas and the Bantams would be better appreciated 
than now. These Lilliputian hens are nice mothers, 
and pay to raise for this office alone. 

Speaking of the weight of eggs reminds us of seeing 
weighed the other day twelve taken from a basket of 
Brahma eggs that weighed two pounds and two 
ounces, and a dozen taken from a basket of them col- 
lected from the native farm stock on the Cape that 
weighed but one pound and two ounces, just one pound 
difference. Wherein is the justice of selling them by 
the dozen ? Bantam's eggs will weigh fifteen to the 
pound, and twenty-two ounces is standard weight for 
the Bantam hens themselves, while the Brahma pullet of 
eight pounds was the producer of the two pounds two 
ounce dozen. Bantam eggs are the smallest in the list, 
yet they are the largest twice over in proportion to the 
weight of the producers. It matters not what the 
breeds are. One bushel of corn or its equivalent in 
other flesh-growing foods, will produce nine to eleven 
pounds of live weight in poultry, and one has only to 
weigh his fowls to approximate their food cost, for 
cost of care must be added. 

When fowls are fed sparingly, being kept short, they 
become a bill of expense, for there are no stocks that 
pay so poorly if neglected. But if extra care be taken 
to furnish them all that nature lavishes in her bounty 
upon them, there are no creatures in the barn-yard will 
pay you so well for that care. A greater profit will be 
realized from all those breeds that hatch and rear theii 




LIGHT BRAHMAS. 



I8 5 




WHITE LEGHORNS. 



173 



POULTRY CULTURE. 35 

own young if you allow them each to hatch and rear 
one brood of chicks during the season, for the incubat- 
ing season gives the laying functions rest, and you get 
more eggs, we are confident, in the year, beside the 
care of the brood of chicks gratis ; and as the chicks 
will pay one hundred per cent profit on their cost, you 
will find that many of the incubating breeds will pay 
as well, and even better, than some of the non-sitting 
varieties. In all breeds it will be found to pay to take 
pains to make your selections from the best laying 
families of the breed, for there is as much difference in 
them as there is in the Shorthorn breed of cattle for 
milk. 

Whichever breed we may select to keep it will not 
be found well to keep them beyond the second season, 
as young stock do much better — such yearlings as 
molt early. One had much better keep thus selecting 
about a half to carry over into the third year; the bal- 
ance of the fowls coming two years old should be sold 
as poultry just before chickens come into market, when 
they bring a much better price, and their value will re- 
place them with young stock. If the young stock is 
to be reared on the farm, it will necessitate the rearing 
of as many chickens as the breeding stock number, for 
chicks hatch nearly equal as to sex, which only enables 
you to replace the two-year-old birds each year sent to 
market. 

In nearly all the cases where we find people breed- 
ing in a practical way, we find them using only what 
we call native or mongrel stock. This, we believe, is a 
mistake, for the thoroughbred is worth as much, and 
many of the breeds far more, for this practical work ; 



36 POULTRY CULTURE. 

and should all use the thoroughbred, killing, as they do 
now, one-third for poultry, using the larger number left 
to produce eggs for the market, using as breeders only 
the best they raise, selling only for breeding purposes 
when a fair price (say from two dollars and fifty cents 
to ten dollars each) could be realized, they would in 
this way raise the standard and come to learn that in 
every twelve fowls they kept they had the value of a 
cow, and caring for them as well they would find they 
paid as well. 

Show us a farmer who is conscious of capital invested 
in his fowls and we will show you a farmer who makes 
money out of them. The greater the number raised, 
the higher the price you will be able to command for 
the best individual specimens. This has proved true in 
cattle. (See History of Shorthorn Cattle in America.) 
It is every day proved in the case of fowls. Twenty-five 
years ago we sold Light Brahmas at one dollar each, 
and the price was considered a fair one, the native then 
selling for thirty-three cents. When the price increased 
to twenty-five dollars per trio, it became the town talk ; 
but in the past three years, when we have sold cockerels 
at one hundred dollars, and trios at one hundred and 
fifty dollars, it has ceased to be a surprise, and really 
it is not in keeping with bulls at seventeen thousand 
dollars each. We expect to live to see specimens of 
superior excellence sold as high as two hundred and 
fifty dollars. Already, in England, five hundred dollars 
a trio has been realized. 




DARK BRAHMAS. 



«*. 



CHAPTER III. 



TYPE IN BREEDING, AND STRAINS OF LIGHT 
BRAHMAS. 

IN setting up your boys in the business of practical 
poultry keeping, or for breeding thoroughbreds 
for the market, it is well that they have a motive and 
aim in view, — something that will interest and instruct 
them as well as help them to make money. We will 
therefore give a rule to secure uniform type and color 
in breeding, or how to establish a strain of such blood, 
hoping by interesting them in the theory to interest 
them in the practical workings of it. 

The American people are lovers of " beauty " in 
everything; a beautiful horse, a beautiful cow, all de- 
mand a price far above those of equal merit that fail in 
symmetry. Then in breeding aim to attain : first, 
beauty or symmetry ; second, color ; and both coupled 
with merit as egg producers; and as the first two arc 
to be transmitted in a greater degree by the male, it 
becomes of great importance that he should possess 
those desirable features. 

In selecting a sire be sure that he is well-bred and 
comes from a line of "good ones" a bird which is the 
counterpart of his sire, for then you have a double 
guarantee that he will control the offspring. As a rule, 
the offspring bred back to the grandsire — the sire and 
grandsire being alike — we start with almost a certainty 

37 



38 POULTRY CULTURE. 

of success, if we do our part in the mating. Having 
made our selection, we must put our foot down and 
stand firmly to the rule of breeding to no sires but this 
one, or males of his get, and none of them that do not 
assume the likeness of the sire, thus establishing a line, 
or " strain of blood," which, in a single word, means 
uniformity. 

In the hen secure first, productiveness as to eggs ; 
second, a robust constitution, 'coming from a long-lived 
race ; third, color ; lastly, symmetry ; and from this 
mating select the large pullets that most resemble the 
sire, and breed them back to the sire. This second 
crop of birds will be three-fourths the blood of the sire 
you selected as the founder of your strain. 

Now the more stubbornly the blood of the first dam 
gives up to the blood of the sire, the more good it will 
do us when subjected properly to him. 

Many select well bred hens of a weakly constitution 
to make the first cross, for they assert, and truthfully, 
that the sire, being so robust and strong, nearly all the 
chicks favor the sire. This is all true, but it is also 
true that the blood used in the hen is weak and will 
fail in lasting quality. We like strong blood ; that 
which in the first cross seems to fight for the breeding 
influence ; that which has got to be bred back to the 
strain desired, and the control given if only by a pre- 
ponderance of blood. We then get a lasting good 
from the cross. Constitution and vital force must 
come from the dam, form and color from the sire; and 
in all the matings the introduction of new blood must 
be with a thought to that end. 

The crossing of two well bred strains oftentimes pro- 




BLACK-BREASTED KED GAMES. 



207 



POULTRY CULTURE. 39 

duces a distinct and new type which is very beautiful. 
To secure this new type (which is in itself a fact that 
the two elements producing were of equal strength, as 
neither controlled the breeding), and to perpetuate it, 
it would in that case be wise to select a dam of delicate 
though pure blood, thus giving the sire all the chance 
possible to stamp his offspring ; then by breeding his 
pullet back, to concentrate his breeding in his grand- 
children, they also being his children ; then we could 
go on, by selections of coarser or stronger dams for 
new blood for the strain. The American breeder is of 
a restless nature ; he wants something that is peculiar 
to himself, something in which he can be identified. 
You find them all over the country chopping up the 
blood of their birds by the introduction of new sires, 
first from one flock, then from another, hoping thereby 
to have something different. They succeed ; but when 
they have got it they are disappointed that no one else 
wants it. They think the bottom has gone out of the 
chicken business, and they curse the business and 
retire. Of such we will say, the business is better off 
when they do retire. Now there is but one way 
to reach uniformity in breeding, no matter whether 
it is horses, cattle or fowls, and that is by " in-breed- 
ing," and like poison, it may kill or cure, just according 
as we display good judgment in its use. 

Whenever we introduce new dams to a strain, breed 
their progeny back to the sire of the strain, and never 
use sires from this new introduction of blood until the 
blood has become thoroughly subjected to the strain. 

To explain : If the chicks of the mating of the pul- 
lets to sires of the strain are not all in type like the 



40 POULTRY CULTURE. 

strain, then breed back again, and do not use a male as 
a stock bird until the desired affinity of the blood has 
been accomplished. As a rule, use no male with less 
than seven-eighths of the blood of the strain, nor females 
with less than three-fourths of the blood of your strain 
as stock birds. 

If all the breeders would adopt this plan of breed- 
ing, and would keep a record, they would then see the 
importance of pedigree, and how beautifully all these 
things are governed by a natural law. We can mix the 
blood of our birds as easily as we mix the paints 
that give us different tints in color. By adhering to 
this mode one breeder becomes of benefit to his neigh- 
bor breeder, for by crossing strains the pullets become 
of equal value to each ; each breeding back to his re- 
spective strain makes the blood of his neighbors' strain 
feed the blood of his own. When breeders learn this, 
and work together, they will all be better off, and may 
become founders of families in fowls, as now breeders of 
Shorthorns become in cattle. We will follow out this 
subject by considering 

THE STRAINS OF LIGHT BRAHMAS. 

We speak of fowls as being of such and such a per- 
son's strain, but with no significance in the sense of 
individuality. Fowls cannot be said to be of a strain 
unless it can be shown by history or pedigree of blood 
that they possess fifty per cent or more of the blood of 
the strain. A type that reproduces itself is simply the 
result of an established strain. 

It is proper to speak of Williams', Gilman's, Buz- 
zell's, Dibble's or Bacon's stock, but to speak of strains 




IIOUDANS. 



221 




PLYMOUTH ROCKS. 



225 



POULTRY CULTURE. 41 

of blood in this connection is all wrong, for there does 
not exist, nor has there ever been more than four strains 
of Brahma blood brought to the country, and we have 
to number the birds Mr. Burnham calls Grey Shanghais, 
to reach even that number. 

If A purchase a cock of B, and the second year pur- 
chase one of C, to follow it upon his flock, the chicks 
cannot be called A's strain ; nor can it be called A's 
stock, only in -the sense of ownership, for the blood is 
one-half C's, one-fourth B's, and only one-fourth the 
original blood of A's stock, C's stock being the more 
proper name, since it has twice as much blood of that 
strain as either of the others. 

The word strain implies, in breeding, a strict ad- 
herence to the blood of a particular family or 
importation, admitting no more foreign blood than is 
necessary to sustain the health and vigor of the race. 

In this chapter it is our purpose to show what 
strains have been received and to what extent they 
have been retained, showing as far as possible what 
the principal Light Brahmas of the country are made 
up of ; for the time has come when information show- 
ing that a recorded history of blood and breeding of 
both sire and dam is needed. 

One may have females of one strain and purchase a 
male of another, and by in-breeding secure both in 
their purity, for there is a constant waste going on in 
the blood, which must be replaced ; and we think it 
can be demonstrated that more than one-eighth of 
foreign blood has to be introduced before the original 
suffers any organic change, and that this one-eighth 
is consumed by the original in supplying this waste 



42 POULTRY CULTURE. 

spoken of. To illustrate our position, we will mate 
the strains as we would a pair of chicks of one strain, 
and show that the same rule of in-breeding applies to 
them as to the fowls of an established strain. We 
mate a Felch sire to an Autocrat hen ; the first season 
the progeny is one-half Autocrat and one-half Felch. 
In the second year we mate these pullets to this same 
sire, No. I Felch, and produce chicks that are three- 
fourths Felch and one-fourth Autocrat. We also mate 
a cockerel of the first cross to the Autocrat dam, and 
produce progeny three-fourths Autocrat. The third 
year we mate the three-fourths Felch pullets again to 
the original sire, and we produce seven-eighths Felch 
birds, while again mating a three-fourths Autocrat 
cockerel to the original dam, we produce a progeny 
seven-eighths Autocrat. We have now produced the 
two strains from a single pair, and we claim them to be 
in their purity, for the blood of each has been grad- 
ually reduced in each family until entirely consumed. 
Beyond the point named it will not do to go, as further 
in-breading would result in sterility ; yet we can take 
birds from each of these families of the third year's 
breeding and repeat the same process " ad libitum." 

We can vouch for this experiment up to this point 
of seven-eighths. It is on this principle that we have 
the pure Duchess and pure Princess cattle ; and al- 
though we may say a cow is one one-hundred-and-twenty- 
eighth Old Favorite, yet is purely the blood of Old 
Favorite of Shorthorn fame, we are consistent, for this 
infusion of one-eighth new blood but supplies the 
waste in the original ; consequently nothing is added, 
and the blood remains pure. 




233 




239 



POULTRY CULTURE. 43 

Among horsemen the rule generally followed is to 
breed out, as they term it, once, and breed in twice, by 
which process they reach only the three-fourths rule, 
which is hardly enough to secure against loss of type 
and color in poultry ; for we have demonstrated that 
one-eighth is the amount actually consumed, and if we 
do not breed in to that extent our flock gradually 
changes in type and color. If with a strain once 
established we make a cross, and breed back to sires of 
the strain having out-crosses other than the ones we 
have described above, we can breed in so far as to pro- 
duce chicks sixty-one sixty-fourths of the blood of the 
original strain. Males of such production are valuable, 
but the females are generally poor layers and poor 
breeders, producing small, tough-shelled eggs, which 
seldom hatch. 

The matings that produce birds three-fourths and 
seven-eighths the blood of the original strain (this being 
the prolific stage of in-breeding) have the most merit as 
egg-producers and show-birds. Pride in one's strain, 
and a desire to keep up the prepotency in the male 
line, should be the only inducement to breed beyond 
the seven-eighths cross. 

To do this work of breeding, and the more easily to 
control it, a record or pedigree should be kept by every 
breeder ; and all males and pens of females used as 
breeders be named, if for no other reason than to give 
them an individuality, and to fix them in memory. 

All breeders should keep a pedigree-book. The 
time has come which compels us to do so for self-pro- 
tection, for the prominent strains are becoming more 
or less intermingled. The Standard by its influence 



44 POULTRY CULTURE. 

is converting the different strains into one commc 
type and color. Since there is no outward indication 
of difference of blood, one can see how essential a 
pedigree is, so that in mating we may be sure of a cross 
when we purchase a sire or dam. One hardly wishes 
to send one thousand miles for specimens to put into 
his flock and find them identical in blood with his own. 

The cattle-breeder, in purchasing a bull to stand at 
the head of his herd, looks up his pedigree, and by 
that pedigree is enabled to select one that is bred in 
line with his own stock, yet with a cross of blood 
that will by its introduction improve his herd and be 
consumed by it, without changing in any way the in- 
dividuality of the strain of blood he takes pride in 
breeding. 

This introduction of new blood is but the feeding of 
the strain, and it is of as vital importance to know 
that we feed the blood as to know what we feed in the 
manger to support the life of the organism. 

A truthful record or pedigree would crush out the 
existing jealousies and restore harmony, for it compels 
breeders to stand or fall upon their own merits, and 
makes the blood and the specimen of a strain worth as 
much in one man's hands as in another's, as we now 
see demonstrated in Shorthorn cattle. 

None can fail to see what a benefit it would be if a 
printed record or history of all the Light Brahmas now 
bred in the States could be made as a basis — a founda- 
tion-blood from which to obtain a pedigree, or to use in- 
mating, and what an influence it would have on the 
same by bringing such strains and sub-strains into 
notice, and as a result furnish a ready market. 




COLORED DORKINGS 



249 




SILVER-SPANGLED HAMBURGS. 



353 



POULTRY CULTURE. 45 

The real strains being once established, and the sit- 
uation understood, the breeder would be relieved of 
the annoyance of having inferior stock palmed off as 
his strain by irresponsible parties, and the blunders in 
mating made by purchasers would be prevented. The 
pedigree discloses the breeder, and the assertion that 
such are Felch, Autocrat or Philadelphia birds, if 
proved by a pedigree, has a meaning, and protects the 
honest breeder. We know many are opposed to pedi- 
gree, for it prevents the selling of superannuated hens 
as yearlings, and presents to the amateur too sure a 
rule for breeding ; for the selfish say, " Let the begin- 
ners do as we did, and work out the problem for 
themselves by experience." 

In looking over the winning birds for the past ten 
years it is surprising to see how universally it is true 
that they are the result of uniting two strains, and 
breeding back to one of them. As we present the his- 
tory of the different strains and sub-strains, or flocks 
composed of two or more strains, with statistics as to 
their breeding, the rule will be apparent. 

THE BURNHAM STRAIN. 

This strain was, as he affirms, and as we understand 
the matter, the Gray Shanghai of 1849-50. From this 
blood was produced the fowls presented to the Queen. 
In 1866 the purest blood of this strain was found in 
the possession of Mr. Phillips, and was known and 
handled by Mr. Williams and Mr. Comey as Phillips 
birds. Mr. Phillips, just before his death, in conversa- 
tion with Mr. Comey, asserted that his flock was from 
the birds sent to the Queen by Geo. P. Burnham, that 



46 POULTRY CULTURE. 

he had bred them as closely as he could, using but one 
or two top crosses, and breeding back in a general way. 
He did not preserve the strain by any fixed rule of in- 
breeding, yet he must have preserved to a large degree 
the original blood, as his birds, to a large extent, come 
with single combs. They were dark in blood, preserv- 
ing the Chittagong characteristic of dark undercolor. 
The blood of this Chinese strain has been used to a 
considerable extent by breeders of other strains, as we 
will show anon. Until 1856 or 1858 these birds were 
known as Chittagongs, or Single-Combed Brahmas, as 
was also the Rankin strain. 

THE RANKIN STRAIN. 

The original birds of this strain were from India. 
This Mr. Rankin can clearly show. They were large 
in frame, had low single combs, dark undercolor in 
back, and large, lemon-colored legs with a prominent 
greenish-blue vein down the inside. The last feature 
seems to have followed the crosses of this strain with 
other strains, and seems to have been transmitted more 
readily than any other. Up to 1866 this strain or im- 
portation was kept pure. About that time the differ- 
ent exhibitions ceasing to give prizes to Single-Combed 
Brahmas, Mr. Rankin was compelled to use top crosses 
of pea-combed sires from the Chamberlin strain, and 
other sub or mixed strains, to secure the engraftment 
of the pea-comb on his strain ; and as breeding back so 
as to retain the pea-comb would be too discouraging a 
process to accomplish his purpose, it is more than 
probable that the race hardly held its own as a strain, 




SILVER-PENCILED IIAMHURGS. 



2«57 




LIGHT BRAHMA COCK. 



277 



POULTRY CULTURE, 47 

for it would be obliged to retain fully fifty per cent of 
the original blood to be called a strain now. 

These birds, however, have been largely used by 
the breeders of other strains, for Mr. Rankin shipped 
large numbers of them to Connecticut, and to and 
about Philadelphia, which, with the Dr. Kerr birds, 
have largely entered into, and, being subject to top 
crosses of the Chamberlin strain, have become the 
origin and foundation-blood of the Philadelphia (Tees) 
strain. 

THE PHILADELPHIA STRAIN. 

The Philadelphia strain was known as Kensington 
or Tees stock about 1867 and 1868. While these birds 
can hardly be called a distinct strain, yet as such they 
have been used, in connection with those of the Ran- 
kin strain, by the breeders of the Autocrat and Cham- 
berlin strains, and the crosses have proved of the very 
best, and as auxiliaries deserve a notice in this connec- 
tion. 

This sub-strain (so to speak) which comprised the 
Brahmas in and about Philadelphia in 1866, were the 
winners in the Philadelphia and the New York exhi- 
bitions in that year, and were called the " Tees " birds. 
In conversation with Messrs. Henry, Tees, Sharpless 
and Herstine, we learned that the foundation-blood 
was originally from India and the Dr. Kerr birds which 
were from China. Whether they made allusion to the 
birds sent to Philadelphia by Mr. Rankin or to birds 
direct from Chittagong we cannot say, and it makes 
but little difference, for, as they affirmed, they were 
single-combed as a rule, and large of frame, with pale 
yellow legs. 



48 POULTRY CULTURE. 

From 1863 to 1868 these birds were converted into 
pea-combed stock by top crosses of birds from Con- 
necticut and New York, which were probably from the 
Chamberlin strain or birds of like origin. At least 
we know this to be true in the case of the bird known 
as the fourth-prize cock of New York, in 1868, at the 
rink, he being from a cockerel bred by Mr. Pool, of 
New York, and out of hens by Baron Sanborn 302, 
bred by I. K. Felch. 

We have spoken of the peculiar color and vein in the 
leg of the Rankin strain, and the power with which the 
race transmitted it. 

The fact that this feature, though in a milder de- 
gree, was apparent in the crosses of the Philadelphia 
birds with those of the Felch, also with the crosses of 
the Autocrat strain, seems to indicate that the Rankin 
or similar blood entered largely into the foundation- 
blood of the Philadelphia birds of that period, as the 
parties we have alluded to affirm. Again, the birds 
brought from Philadelphia in 1868 and 1869 had the 
color of the Chamberlin leg, yet they still retained the 
Rankin shape of bone, being more round in its forma- 
tion than that of the Chamberlin stock. It will be 
seen that all the birds purchased of Mr. Williams from 
his so-called " Favorite Stock " did not materially alter 
the blood, for they were but the result of mingling the 
blood of the Rankin, Burnham (the Phillips Stock), and 
the Chamberlin strains, which is like the blood of the 
Philadelphia strains, for Burnham's and the Dr. Kerr 
birds they affirm were alike and from China. 

These birds were quite short in the back as com- 
pared to the Autocrat or Chamberlin strains. 




DARK BRAHMA COCK. 
281 




DARK BRAHMA HEN. 



•84 



POULTRY CULTURE. 49 

One fact worthy of note here is, that the old hen 
exhibited by Charles Tees in 1 867, then eleven years 
old, was as fine a Light Brahma hen in color and size 
as has been shown since, and her beautiful pea-comb 
shows that there were pea-combs and bluish under- 
colored specimens bred in 1856. She weighed fourteen 
pounds and four ounces, a larger weight for a Brahma 
hen than has since been bred, thirteen pounds and 
fifteen ounces, and fourteen pounds being the best 
weight for a Felch bird, and fourteen pounds, and two 
ounces the largest Autocrat hen on record. The writer 
fails to see that the Almighty has suffered man to in- 
crease the size beyond that of the original. 

There were several breeders of these Philadelphia 
birds of 1868, and if they have kept a record of the 
top crosses used since that time that have been of a 
different strain, it will be of much interest to others ; 
for, as breeders, we are compelled to breed to that 
form and color defined in the Standard of Excellence, 
and our strains constantly needing blood-food, it makes 
it necessary that the blood of each strain be different, 
and thereby does it become more valuable. 

All the strains are dependent one upon the other 
for this blood-food, and not only is it a personal inter- 
est to preserve these distinct types of blood, but it 
becomes a general necessity, for a strain that is iso- 
lated soon runs out ; the loss of color and vitality soon 
works its own ruin. 

The top cross of Beauty Duke upon the Philadel- 
phia birds, as Mr. Wade and the writer understands 
the matter, was simply adding a new top cross to the 
amount of one-fourth the blood of the Chamberlin 



50 



POULTRY CULTURE. 



derived from the cross of the fourth-prize cock of New- 
York, 1868, with Felch hens. But if, as it has been 
claimed, he was the progeny of a son of Duke of York 
and a Philadelphia hen, upon a Felch and Philadelphia 
hen, then he carried into his Philadelphia harem one- 
eighth the blood of Old Autocrat and one-eighth 
Chamberlin blood, as a top cross upon the Philadelphia 
birds of 1868. 




LIGHT BRAHMA HEN. 



THE AUTOCRAT STRAIN. 

The history of this bird, Autocrat, is well known. 
Mr. Estes purchased the bird in Fulton Market, New 



POULTRY CULTURE. 51 

York, the seller avowing that he was imported. The 
subsequent history of this bird, his strong breeding 
qualities, the fact that when the blood was crossed 
with other strains it produced new types, this, with the 
pearl eye so different from the prevailing bay eye in 
other Brahmas, to our mind presents grounds for be- 
lieving the assertion that he was imported, although 
there is no proof to that effect. 

This bird was bred one season to females whose 
foundation-blood was the George P. Burnham birds, 
being the progeny of the stock sent to the Queen by 
that gentleman, the birds being " Phillips Stock," so 
called by Mr. Williams, who sent them to Mr. Estes. 
In 1866 Mr. Estes presented Autocrat to Mr. Williams, 
who bred him to the best birds he could procure from 
several sources. 

The better to understand the advantages received 
by the breeders of Light Brahmas through the advent 
of " Old Autocrat " it is necessary to say that before 
the war Mr. Williams' stock of Light Brahmas con- 
sisted of the Chamberlin blood, through purchases of 
them at Valley Falls, the Burnham blood and the 
blood of the Rankin importation. When Mr. Williams 
returned from the war, his old love clinging to him, he 
commenced again by purchasing the best stock he 
could procure in his locality, the same being descend- 
ants from stock he bred before going south ; also birds 
of Mr. Strout, of Framingham, that were from a cock 
purchased in Abington, mated to a Felch hen by a son 
of Baron Sanborn 302 ; also, hens of H. G. White, 
which were pure Felch, by Baron Sanborn 302. Birds 
bred from these elements were the foundation-blood in 



6k POULTRY CULTURE. 

Mr. Williams' yards, and out of which came his " Fav- 
orite Stock," and the same were in his possession when 
Old Autocrat appeared on the stage. Autocrat was 
mated to the best birds to be found in all these 
elements, and the male produce was Autocrat 3d, 
Eaton's Autocrat, Lord Berkeley and two other sons. 

Old Autocrat died early in the season. Lord 
Berkeley was a dark-plumaged bird, and as he bred 
very dark he was sold to go west. 

Autocrat 3d was a very large bird, but did not prove 
a good sire, many of his chicks coming single-combed. 
The greenish-blue vein was prominent in the leg, which 
strongly indicated a Rankin cross in his dam. He was 
lost by sickness, and his place filled by Eaton's Auto- 
crat, who proved a good sire, but the plumage of his 
chicks was dark. In all these Autocrat crosses the 
dark undercolor prevailed. 

One of the other sons was sent to Mr. Estes, of 
North Carolina, where he was bred to birds of the year 
previous, out of the Phillips birds by Old Autocrat, 
producing the birds Colossus, Apollo and Triumph, all 
of which were purchased by Mr. Williams. That the 
blood of old Autocrat was radically different from 
other established strains is apparent in the fact that 
whenever crosses were made with it they proved good, 
showing increased size and producing new types, which 
had equal strength in breeding with other established 
strains. 

The friends of the old bird express a regret that he 
could not have lived, and his progeny bred back to 
him, thinking that the results would have been aston- 
ishing, and they consider his death a misfortune. 




BUFF COCHIN PULLET. 



393 




BUFF COCHIN COCK. 



289 



POULTRY CULTURE. 53 

Now we do not concur in this opinion, alth .ugh 
friendly to Old Autocrat, for his progeny bred too dark. 
It may be said that this fault of the progeny was de- 
rived from the Phillips hens. To this we cannot assent, 
for to admit this is to concede the merit of breeding to 
the Phillips stock, and to admit that Old Autocrat was 
weak in breeding qualities, and as all breeding tends 
to grow lighter it is this very dark breeding that has 
made his blood so valuable to breeders of other strains. 
The whole rank of breeding within two years will hail 
the advent of another such bird with joy. To prove 
that this dark blood and breeding is the work of Old 
Autocrat we will say that all the crosses of the old 
bird with the Felch stock resulted in dark-plumage 
birds. The progeny of Autocrat 3d, whose breeding 
indicated so strongly the Rankin descent, bred even 
darker than the others ; the cross of Son of Colossus 
with the Felch hen Penelope was also dark. A son 
of Duke of York out of a Tees hen, even-mated to 
Felch hen, bred dark ; yet the Rankin blood bred to 
Felch did not breed dark, nor did the Tees hen bred to 
Natick, the Felch cock, prove dark. We could cite 
other cases of like breeding, all of which goes to prove 
Old Autocrat to have been dark in blood, and in our 
judgment, had he lived to have been bred to his own 
progeny, they would have been so dark that he and 
his descendants would have been abandoned. As it is, 
he and his blood have proved a blessing, and where 
breeders of other strains have had the patience to wait 
and breed back have been very much appreciated. 
The fact that the hens he was bred to in Mr. Williams' 
hands were of a mixed strain of blood made his prog- 



54 POULTRY CULTURE. 

eny of far more value, for it gave the power of breeding 
more readily to his influence, and they being thus made 
up, gave the preponderance of blood to Old Autocrat, 
which with this great strength of breeding which we 
have shown entitles the blood to the name of a 
"strain." One thing is certain, his blood has been the 
only competitor the Chamberlin-Felch strain has ever 
had, and surely the Felch and the Autocrat birds have 
done more to make the interest in light Brahmas what 
it is in America than all other causes combined. 

So thoroughly has Mr. Williams become identified 
with this strain that to a great extent it is quoted as 
Williams stock. But there are others in a like manner 
quoted, which makes it fair to state that Mr. Comey, 
of Quincy, Mass., as well as Mr. Williams, its principal, 
is breeding the Autocrat strain, fed by the blood of the 
Felch and the Philadelphia strains, and that of other 
sub-strains, to maintain its vitality. 

DUKE OF YORK. 

Mr. Comey 's Duke of York was a grandson of Old 
Autocrat in a double sense, for both his sire and dam 
were the progeny of Old Autocrat out of the Phillips 
hens, bred by Mr. Estes. The Phillips hens, as we have 
described above, were in foundation-blood the same as 
the stock sent to the Queen by Mr. Burnham. The 
Duke of York was a vigorous bird, and lived to be bred 
to his own progeny, and also to the Philadelphia hens 
purchased of Chas. Tees by Mr. Comey, and to this 
mating we believe should be given the credit of bring- 
ing out in its best form the breeding qualities of the 
Duke, for sons by the Duke out of his daughter, mated 




PARTRIDGE-COCHIN COCK. 



397 




PARTRIDGE-COCHIN PULLET. 



3or 



Poultry culture. 55 

with the pullets by him out of the Philadelphia hens, 
proved excellent birds ; but the first cross with the 
Philadelphia hen developed poor combs, as did the 
Philadelphia stock with the Felch hens. 

It may be asked by the friends of Philadelphia stock 
where the progeny of Colossus got their faulty combs. 
We will say, just where the Tees stock got them, — from 
the Rankin. The blood was there, and large birds 
could not be forced without its development. 

Mr. Comey made crosses of the Rankin strain, which, 
as he informs us, he abandoned, as it with the York 
blood developed nothing desirable but size. Since 
1869 Mr. Comey has confined himself principally to 
different Autocrat crosses, as can be seen in the Duke 
of Norfolk, Duke of Springfield, etc., descendants of 
Colossus, Apollo, and Triumph. He has adhered more 
closely to in-breeding than most other friends of the 
strain. 

In closing our remarks upon the blood of Autocrat 
we will say that, so far as they allude to Mr. Williams, 
they were submitted to him, and after examination by 
that gentleman we received the following : 

Mr. Felch: 

I have your manuscript, and have carefully read it. I cannot see 
that you have made any mistakes or said anything that is not true ; 
neither could I add anything that would make the history more com- 
plete. Wishing you success, I am, Yours truly, 

P. WILLIAMS. 



56 POULTRY CULTURE. 



THE CHAMBERLIN STRAIN, NOW SO WIDELY KNOWN 
AS THE "FELCH STRAIN." 

This strain is well known as coming from the birds 
that were found by Mr. Knox in the India ship in New 
York city in 1847. The first to breed these birds were' 
Mr. Chamberlin and Mr. Cornish, of Connecticut, and 
Mr. Smith and Mr. Childs, of Rhode Island, the last- 
named individual winning the Albany and Barnum ex- 
hibitions of New York. The strain was in but very 
few hands up to 1852, at which time at Boston it 
created the sensation which gave to the breed an iden- 
tity and a name. For several years it went by the 
name of Brahmas or Short-Legged Chittagongs, the 
breeders clinging to the then good reputation of the 
Chittagong. But from 1857 to 1865 we see theChitta- 
gong conceding the palm to the Brahma, by returning 
the compliment and being exhibited as Single-Combed 
Brahmas; and finally, in 1865 we find them discarded 
altogether as a race — the edict that all Brahmas should 
have a pea-comb sending them into oblivion. 

This Chamberlin strain from its advent has bred, as 
a rule, pea-combs and orange-yellow legs. The early 
specimens being creamy white, and the prevailing un- 
dercolor bluish-white, it has been a struggle to keep 
this bluish undercolor, for all strains grow lighter, and 
at the present writing, with all the care to retain it, 
one-half of the specimens will come white in under- 
color. To secure fine neck-hackles and dark tails and 
wings, this bluish-white undercolor is absolutely neces- 
sary; and in introducing new blood into a strain one can 
see how important it is that a dark specimen be chosen. 



POULTRY CULTURE. 59 

FELCH PEDIGREE STRAIN. 

From the original birds bred by Mr. Chamberlin 
came the cock Imperial 300 (the male that has been face- 
tiously mentioned as the bird Mr. Felch bought for a 
dollar or two out of a hen-cart), the founder of the well- 
known Felch strain of Light Brahmas. The female to 
which Imperial 300 was mated came from eggs bought 
from Mr. Childs (alluded to above), and were from Virgil 
Cornish, being in blood the same, and the name of Cham- 
berlin strain would be far more appropriate as indicative 
of its origin ; but as the breeding world has seen fit in its 
generosity to know the strain by the name of the writer 
of this work, he can only accept the situation. 

The writer is well aware that but for his love for 
the breed during the lull in the chicken fancy, from 
1855 to 1864, when nearly all the fanciers allowed their 
fowls to run out, so to speak, and accidental good luck 
in the way of an tgg laid by Old Princess, out of which 
Honest Abe 307 was hatched, he too would have lost 
his interest, and with it would have been lost the pedi- 
gree and proof of blood that has preserved the identity 
of the strain. 

The writer would prefer that the strain should be 
known by the name of its original founder rather than 
to have it as it is, for he is now made responsible for 
the breeding of the strain, it matters not who mates 
them nor how far they are removed from his breeding, 
for then he could stand or fall on his own merits as a 
breeder, and his reputation would only be affected by 
the specimens bred by him and sold by himselt. 
In speaking of the management of the strain, we will 
do so in the first person, submitting the following : 



60 POULTRY CULTURE. 

Since the purchase of Imperial 300 and the egg out 
of which I produced the hen Lady Childs, I have kept 
a true record of blood and breeding of all the families 
of the strain. This discloses all the introductions of 
new blood, and from what source it has come. These 
introductions of new blood have been made on the 
principle that all animal life is suffering a continual 
waste, and is in as constant need of blood-food in a re- 
productive sense as it is of daily food to supply the 
waste in the individual, and experience teaches that no 
strain can be sustained without this supply. 

The blood used to vitalize the strain in my hands 
has been: First the blood in the old Nanturier hen, as 
seen in the use of Duchess, in 1858, being used as 
stock in my pedigree fowls in the hen Princess 362, 
which was one-eighth Nanturier blood. The next 
cross was Lady Mills 364, she being three-fourths 
Chamberlin and one-fourth Burnham blood, her one- 
, fourth foreign blood being derived from the then 
so-called Chittagong or Gray Shanghai, from the 
Burnham Queen strain. Since 1865 all new blood has 
been drawn from the Autocrat strain, as seen in the 
following birds (see my pedigrees in the World's Pedi- 
gree Book) : 

Autocrat Belle 392, Eaton Belle 407, Lady Ips- 
wich 1022, and Maud Williams 4146, and the cocks 
Experiment 337 and Ned Williams 4145, a brother 
to Duke of Springfield. The crosses from the Phila- 
delphia birds being Chicago Belle 382, Mrs. Strout 404 
and the cockerel fourth-prize cock of New York, 1868. 

By the tracing of these pedigrees it will be seen just 
how much blood other than the Chamberlin (the orig- 




Felch Light Brahmas. 



*7 




3<>5 



POULTRY CULTURE. Gl 

mal blood) is now represented in the Felch birds, or 
strain now bred by me. I will speak of some of the 
characteristics developed by these crosses. 

While it was asserted at the 1852 Exhibition at Bos- 
ton that this was a breed that would never run out, 
and although there has never been a breed so severely 
in-bred, yet all this introduction of blood was necessary 
to preserve the original type and color, for if contin- 
ually in-bred a loss of constitution, a change of type^ 
and a reversion to white in color would have followed, 
while. the third in-breeding of new blood to a strain 
will invariably result in fine specimens. 

In the early crosses of Autocrat blood with the 
Felch the progeny was invariably too dark in plumage, 
and although oftentimes developing new types, the 
first in-breeding would restore three-fourths of the 
progeny, while a portion of the males would revert to 
light color, as in the case of Moses 327. The third in- 
breeding to the strain was necessary to a full restora- 
tion to the Felch type and color. (For my reason for 
that, see notes in history of Old Autocrat.) 

The cross of Experiment 347 (Autocrat) with Co- 
lumbia 386 (Felch) produced chicks of the same char- 
acter, which took two in-breedings to restore. 

The cross of Son of Colossus (Autocrat) to Penelope 
1019 (Felch) presented the same feature, but the third 
in-breeding to the strain produced birds scaling 92 to 
94 points, and many won first prizes. I think that had 
Old Autocrat lived to have been bred to his own prog- 
eny, his blood, so highly prized by breeders of other 
strains as new blood, would have been discarded. As 
it is, I presume Mr. Williams and myself have often- 



62 POULTRY CULTURE. 

times been censured, or at least the stock has been, for 
this very virtue — strength of breeding— by those striv- 
ing to cross the strains, and many a good bird aban- 
doned, which, had it been bred back to either strain, 
would have developed fine stock. 

The tendency to breed dark when the Autocrat and 
Felch crosses are made still exists. The cross of Phi 
Beta 5876, with Juno III 5879, produces a fine 
lot of females, but males too dark in some cases. 
These pullets known as Juanetta 5994, mated to the 
Felch cock Daniel Webster II 5999, continued to breed 
dark enough to produce fully eight per cent of the chicks 
with slate-colored backs. These birds are generally 
males, and grow up to have fine hackles, wings and 
tails, with quite dark undercolor to backs, and when 
they prove females they are, as a rule, too dark for 
exhibition purposes. While this is on the dark ex- 
treme, it is better than to have all hatch absolutely 
white, for then there is more or less loss for want of 
color in neck, wings and tail. One such cross is, how- 
ever, worth three times a cross that resulted in all 
chicks hatching pure white. 

The believers in dark undercolor, with myself, would 
approve, while those so strenuous in their belief in the 
white undercolor of back in breeding stock would con- 
demn. 

The early crosses of the Philadelphia birds with the 
Felch invariably produced lopped combs, and many 
that maintained their upright position had the middle 
division much too high. This and the development of 
the greenish-blue vein on the leg show clearly the India 
cross in the blood of the Philadelphia birds. 



POULTRY CULTURE. 63 

The color was easily controlled, and although there 
was seemingly no difference in the size, yet the prog- 
eny were much larger in the first cross, and were 
longer in arriving at maturity. Chicago Belle 382 
weighed twelve pounds at twelve months old. This 
cross, as developed in Prince 321 by Honest Abe 307, 
proved a very desirable one, as can be proved by H. S. 
Ball, T. L. Sturtevant, and Mark Pitman, all of whom 
used him in breeding. Again Tees Duke (Philadelphia 
blood) bred to Lady Fay(Felch)by a son of Honest Abe 
307 produced the sire and dam of the two hens known 
as Sturtevant hens, each weighing thirteen and one- 
fourth pounds, which were never exhibited without win- 
ning a prize. Their sire and dam were not large, as Mr. 
Strout, of Framingham, Mass., their breeder, can testify. 

The fourth-prize cock of New York for 1868 was 
one-half Philadelphia, one-fourth Felch, and one-fourth 
the blood of fowls bred by Mr. Pool, of New York. 
This cock bred to Felch pullets, daughters of Honest 
Abe 307 produced Lady Rice 405, out of which, by a 
son of Honest Abe 307 (Optimus 3 1 5) was bred Cceur de 
Leon 326, one of the best Light Brahma cocks ever bred 
in America, and the sire of many prize chicks, among 
which was Poqonnuck 999, Ben Lidi 2777, Coeur de Leon 
VI, Leo 2776, and others, selling from $25 to $100 each, 
producing $1,425 worth of chicks in a single season. 
All these crosses of Philadelphia blood were controlled 
in color, which leads me to consider the top crosses of 
the Philadelphia birds to be Chamberlin blood, or that 
of a kindred nature. I speak of these crosses to show 
how dependent the breeder of one strain is upon those 
breeding another, and that whenever new blood is 



64. POULTRY CULTURE. 

taken into any strain of well-bred birds, when it is re- 
duced by in-breeding to that quantity which will soon 
be consumed by the strain, the best results are reached. 
This constant feeding of the blood is necessary, and 
without it no strain can long survive. By one system- 
atic rule we can keep repeating results year after year. 

Science tells us that we are changing constantly ; 
the waste in our blood is renewed by new blood, yet 
the blood in breeding type is the same. So is it with 
strains. The new blood by in-breeding becomes the 
weaker and the prey of the original blood that con- 
sumes it, constantly invigorating the original and not 
changing it in the least in type and color. 

The stock known as the " Sturtevant birds " were 
in the main Felch blood, and after the first year's 
breeding remained three-fourths Honest Abe blood 
and one-fourth that of the fourth-prize cock of New 
York in 1868, the former being Felch, the latter one- 
half Philadelphia, one-fourth Felch, and one-fourth 
Pool blood. Cceur de Leon 326 was bred by T. L. 
Sturtevant, thirteen-sixteenths Felch blood, and as I 
have said, was one of the best birds ever bred in Amer- 
ica. Mr. Sturtevant did not appreciate him, always 
supposing his best birds came from a bird which has 
many times won at the Boston Exhibitions. That Mr. 
Sturtevant was honest in his belief is apparent in the 
fact that he loaned Cceur de Leon to H. F. Felch for 
the season of 1874, with the results previously described. 

The cross of the Philadelphia blood with the Felch, 
as developed in the breeding through Prince 321 and 
Cceur de Leon 326 in the yard of Thos. L. Sturtevant, 
and later in the mating of Cceur 4e Leon 326 with 




' lip 




LANGSHANS. 



309 



POULTRY CULTURE. 65 

Parepa 395 by Moses 327, by H. F. Felch in 1874, was 
no doubt the best coupling of two strains ever made. 
Had Mr. Sturtevant's zeal for poultry culture been as 
lasting as it was fervent at times he would have led the 
van. But his greater love for his dog and gun, and the 
pressure of business, have led him to abandon the breed- 
ing of poultry for the present. 

To review the subject of strains, we come to this 
fact : that there are but very few strains and very few 
marked specimens from which originality of type has 
been established ; and when we indulge in top crosses 
we destroy the strain, unless we resort to in-breeding 
to secure the benefit of the cross, and to insure the 
type of the strain. 

We find also that all the strains or subdivisions of 
strains were, in their origin, dark in undercolor, and 
that with age they grow lighter, and if left to them- 
selves they may lose their original type, change being 
written on all, and only by persistent effort can these 
original types be retained. We should feel that as 
long as we deliver up into other hands these strains as 
good as we receive them, we have been equal to the 
task of breeding them, and should be considered breed- 
ers ; and that if we can improve a breed, surely we 
deserve praise. I am one of the few that say there are 
no better specimens exhibited to-day than were exhib- 
ited years ago. But I do believe the general average 
is far better. The excellence of the few is controlled 
by a fixed law, viz.: The eternal fitness of things, which 
says, " Thus far canst thou go, O man, and no farther." 
We are not endowed with the infinite, and our matings 
are sometimes blunders. 




WYANDOTTES. 



CHAPTER IV. 



DISCUSSION OF MASSACHUSETTS BOARD OF 

AGRICULTURE AT THE CLOSE OF THE 

ESSAY ALLUDED TO IN OUR 

INTRODUCTION. 

SECRETARY FLINT: I have been exceedingly 
interested in the paper which has been read by- 
Mr. Felch. I am sure he has come up to the expec- 
tations of those who had so much confidence, when 
they invited him to prepare this paper. Mr. Felch has 
had many years of thorough and careful experience 
and accurate observation, and I am sure the principles 
which he has enunciated in his paper will be of great 
interest and great value to the large number of poultry 
breeders in this state. 

I should very much like to hear the experience and 
observation of those who are now engaged practically, 
every day, in poultry breeding. There are a great many 
questions, I know, that many persons wish to hear dis- 
cussed, and there are others here who can discuss them 
better than I can. I have been a somewhat extensive 
poultry breeder in the course of my life. I have kept 
a great variety of fowls ; too great a variety, 
altogether, I am sure, for profit. I have generally come 
to the conclusion that where profit, for poultry and 
egg s together, is concerned, the Light Brahma is the 

67 



68 POULTRY CULTURE. 

best breed, but as egg producers the White Leghorn, 
and perhaps one or two other breeds, greatly surpass 
them. 

So far as the feeding of poultry is concerned I am 
pretty well satisfied that farmers and those who keep 
poultry are inclined to feed too much corn. Corn, as 
you all know, will induce fat, and when poultry are to be 
fatted for market they can be fatted probably 
quicker and more economically upon corn or cornmeal, 
heated, than upon any other substance ; but as far as 
my experience has gone, it is not advisable to feed 
corn if you wish to get the largest number of eggs ; it 
induces too great fat, especially if the hens are kept in 
some confinement. Hens that are allowed the whole 
range of the farm may be fed upon almost anything. 
They run off what little extra fat they get, perhaps, 
by eating too much corn ; but poultry that are con- 
fined, or partially confined, ought not to be fed too 
much upon corn. Oats, or any of the smaller grains, 
and vegetables, potatoes, fish, and that class of food, 
it seems to me, are very much better. 

As far as the feeding of fresh or cured rowen or 
young clover is concerned, I have no doubt that what 
Mr. Felch has said is correct. 

Question. Is there any danger of making White 
Leghorns so fat by feeding them on corn that they 
cannot fly? 

Mr. FELCH: I don't think you can give them any- 
thing that will fat them so that they cannot run or fly. 
But as egg producers there is no question that the 
White Leghorn family is the best. They will forage 
for themselves, and pretty thoroughly, and they are 




PLYMOUTH ROCK PULLET. 



347 



POULTRY CULTURE. 69 

stronger in their feet than the Asiatic breeds, if we are 
to judge by the damage they will do in the garden. 

QUESTION. Do you have bottoms to your coops ? 

Mr. FELCH: I do not. I have simply platforms 
for early spring, on which to place the coops, in the 
summer allowing them to set upon the ground. 

QUESTION. How do you feed the clover rowen ? 

Mr. FELCH: After curing it becomes brittle ; sim- 
ply feed in a rick, as to stock. If it is cut up too fine, 
and fed carelessly, they will waste it. 

QUESTION. Which is the best, the Brown or White 
Leghorn ? 

Mr. FELCH: I would not say one was better than 
the other. 

QUESTION. Do you have any difficulty in hatch- 
ing chickens from the eggs that are laid by the 
Asiatics ? 

Mr. FELCH: That is the danger of the whole busi- 
ness. They sometimes become so very fat that it 
will be almost impossible to hatch an egg from them. 
Turn them right out and give them food that will not 
fat them, and you will find that the eggs will hatch well. 

Mr. HERSEY, of Hingham: Mr. Felch says that 
close breeding in-and-in tends to sterility. I would 
like to inquire if he has had any actual tests of this, 
and if so, what difficulties he has encountered? 

Mr. Felch: What I mean by in-and-in breeding 
is breeding birds of the same blood or pedigree to- 
gether. I always take pains when I am breeding in 
line, "breeding in," as I term it, to so mate that there 
will be a change of blood, and secure the chick in 
blood different from sire and dam. It is always better 



70 POULTRY CULTURE. 

to breed back to the sire than to breed the chicks to- 
gether. When introducing a new element of blood, I 
find oftentimes that this works well. This is a rule I 
have followed for twenty years. I believe I was one 
of the first to adopt this course. I never buy a male 
bird, and consequently I have been obliged to make 
this new blood for scores of others ; and when I buy 
a new bird, I treat it in that way, breeding the pullets 
of the first cross right back to a sire of that strain, and 
never use a male bird until I have reduced the foreign 
blood to one-fourth or one-eighth. Now if you breed 
in-and-in for three generations, that is, breed brothers 
and sisters, in three generations, it will be almost im- 
possible to hatch an egg. 

Mr. HERSEY: Have you had any actual tests of it? 

Mr. FELCH: Yes sir ; I believe, as a rule, the state- 
ment I make will hold good. There may be excep- 
tions ; there are exceptions to all rules. But I think if 
any one follows that rule, so that he will know exactly 
what he is doing, he will find that I am correct. But 
the fact is, a great many do not know. They will have 
a flock of birds, and they will save a young cockerel 
from them and breed from them, thinking they are all 
of one blood. If they will start from one single dam and 
breed her chickens together, and their chickens and 
then a third lot, I am quite sure they will reach a point 
where the eggs will not hatch. Unless you have a 
flock of hens in one enclosure you can see how easily 
you lose track of them. You cannot get uniformity 
unless you breed your line of sires to the same strain of 
blood. I think any one who has tried it will agree 
with me in what I have said on that subject. 



K^fc^ 




WHITE LEGHORN COCK. 



335 



POULTRY CULTURE. 71 

Mr. HERSEY: I suppose we meet together here to 
gather facts, and whatever the result of our experi- 
ments may be, it is for our interest to know about 
them. 

Twenty-five years ago I started for the purpose of 
demonstrating, one way or another, whether we should 
be able to breed in-and-in or not. I took a white 
native, and from that white native I have bred for twen- 
ty-five years, and still the eggs hatch. During the 
twenty-five years only three times have I introduced 
anything different, and those three times it was done 
by eggs and eggs only, and the male birds were not 
kept, only the females. But during the last two years 
no new blood has been introduced into my flock, and I 
have bred in-and-in as closely as possible. My poultry 
yard is so situated, and so fenced in, that no other 
poultry can come near them. Now the result is that 
my eggs hatch a great deal better than my neighbors'. 
Three years ago (which was the last year I had the care 
of them myself) I set four sittings of thirteen eggs 
each, and every one of them hatched ; and of four 
others, eleven hatched. I think there was not a single 
sitting that year that gave less than six chickens from 
thirteen eggs. 

Now I admit that I have been careful in breeding 
to take only those fowls which were physically strong 
and perfectly healthy. I think that this is a point to 
which we must look carefully. I believe that healthy 
birds will bring healthy offspring. But perhaps I 
ought not to say what I believe. I only rose to state 
these facts. It is an isolated case, covering a period of 
about twenty-five years. If there were twenty-five 



72 POULTRY CULTURE. 

other individuals here who could stand up and say that 
they had tried the same thing, with the same result, we 
might be able to come to some correct conclusion. 
Perhaps a single experiment is not sufficient. 

Now if other people have tried the experiment of 
in-and-in breeding, and failed, — if they have really 
tried it, and not guessed at it, — of course that must 
count against the experiment which I have made. But 
I hope that if this Board shall meet in this or any 
other hall ten years from this time there will be many 
individuals who will be able to rise up and say, " I 
know from practical tests what the result is of breeding 
in-and-in." 

Mr. Felch: The gentleman who has just taken 
his seat says that the introduction of blood was by 
eggs, saving the females. That does not meet the case, 
for he put half a dozen new elements into his stock 
every time he introduced the eggs, which might have 
helped him out. I do not see that his case touches 
the point which I advanced, for one introduction of six 
pullets would have carried him through the whole 
twenty-five years, and the eggs would have hatched 
well. 

Mr. Bill, of Paxton: I have had some experience 
in keeping hens, but I rise chiefly to add a word to 
what was said on one point by the gentleman who 
gave us the very instructive and interesting essay, and 
that point is this. He spoke of hen-houses in the 
sides of hills, near our farm buildings, so that the fowls 
might forage in the pasture with the cattle. Now he 
did not state what breed of hen would be the best for 
that purpose, but I judge from my own experience that 



POULTRY CULTURE. 73 

a kind of hen not much in favor, perhaps, with most 
hen fanciers, — I mean the Black Red Game, — is the 
one best adapted to that purpose. 

There is an impression abroad among hen dealers, 
and those who have not inquired into the matter, that 
the Black Red Game, or Game hens, are of little value 
except for their fighting qualities, but with all my 
keeping of the Games, I never have seen one fight but 
once, and that was with a White Leghorn, and he got 
awfully thrashed, so I am not keeping him for that 
purpose. But I find that in the pastures the Games 
have the foraging quality, and that is the point I rose 
to make. I know tolerably well four or five kinds of 
Game birds, and any of them will walk off and feed by 
themselves several hundred rods, — almost a quarter of 
a mile. 

Another notion that is prevalent about them is that 
they are quite wild. That comes partly from the 
name — Game. But I find that the Games are as gentle, 
if you treat them gently, as any hens I ever had any- 
thing to do with. As to their laying qualities, I have 
kept them several years and I am confident that they 
do lay well. I would not say that they are as good 
layers as the White Leghorn or the Brown Leghorn, 
but I do not know any other family, except the Leg- 
horns, that excels the Game in laying qualities. 

Another point about the Game is, that their eggs 
are from a quarter to a third larger than the Light 
Brahmas', or than almost any of the pure-blooded 
hens with which I have had anything to do, except the 
Leghorn. 

I would like to ask a question about the Black 



74 POULTRY CULTURE. 

Spanish. What does Mr. Felch know about them, as 
to their laying qualities, constitution, etc.? 

Mr. FELCH: The Black Spanish, before the Leg- 
horn came into notice, was considered the best laying 
fowl. They lay large eggs, but they do not lay a large 
number of them. I think that a full-bred Black Span- 
ish will lay about one hundred and twenty-eight eggs 
in a year, — about what our native fowls will do. Prob- 
ably there is not half a dozen eggs a year difference in 
what the Black Spanish, the Game and native fowls will 
lay, and as a rule the Game eggs are much smaller than 
the Brahma. 

Question. How do the Black Spanish stand the 
cold weather in the winter? 

Mr. Felch: Poorly. A Black Spanish chicken is 
a miserable thing while growing, but when once grown 
the fowl seems to be quite hardy. It is a beautiful bird 
to look at — there is no question about that. If a man 
does not care how much it costs him to produce and 
keep a flock of Black Spanish birds he can have them 
and they will do very well, but they are not profitable 
managed in a practical way. I tried to find the breed 
that a person with the least experience could do the 
best with, everything considered, and that is why I 
selected the Leghorn, Plymouth Rock and Light 
Brahma ; and here let me say that no matter what the 
breed is, the Almighty has so fixed that thing that they 
will all pay a profit, if properly managed. A man wants 
to take the breed that pleases him, and if he does that 
he will be likely to take good care of it and make a 
profit. One man likes the Black Red Game, another 
the Brown Leghorn, and another the Brahma. I do 




375 




ROUEN DUCKS, 



395 



POULTRY CULTURE. 77 

not agree with those who say that the Buff Cochin is 
the best bird of the lot. The Buff Cochin is a splen- 
did hen to raise chickens, and they are handy to have 
for that purpose. They look large, but they are not 
really so. They are very full feathered, and their 
feathers make them look large. 

Mr. Vincent: The Black Spanish do not want to 
sit. 

Mr. FELCH: No ; but they are of weak constitu- 
tion. Still, I can hardly say that, because, when once 
grown, they seem to be hardy, if you can keep them 
away from the frost. Their wattles and combs are 
easily chilled, and that seems to take dl the life out of 
them until spring. 

QUESTION. What do you consider the best cross? 

Mr. FELCH: I consider the best cross in the 
world is the cross of a White Leghorn cock on a Light 
Brahma hen. I say a White Leghorn, because that 
cross will produce a uniform white color. There will 
be no parti-colored feathers, which is an advantage in 
preparing poultry for the market. 

QUESTION. What would be the quantity of eggs 
produced by that cross? 

Mr. FELCH: They will produce as much as either 
^ the thoroughbreds. I have birds in my family of 
f5rahmas that have laid for twenty-three successive 
months without sitting ; but that is unnatural. I have 
received several letters this season from parties to 
whom I have sent birds of this family stating that 
their birds have laid the entire season without wanting 
to sit. The Brahmas, both Dark and Light, do not lay 
in that way as a rule. 



78 POULTRY CULTURE. 

The Leghorn I call a hardy bird. The Black Span- 
ish I call a delicate bird, because they are predisposed 
to disease. The whole Spanish class must have dry, 
warm quarters, or they will have the roup. They will 
have catarrh in the head, and roup follows, and all the 
attendant diseases. You cannot put them in a damp 
place with impunity. 

Mr. CHEEVER: Is there any limit to the number 
of eggs that any one of the breeds of hens can lay? I 
think I have seen it stated in some paper, — from a 
French authority, — that the ovaries are limited. Do 
you know anything about that ? 

Mr. FELCH: I do not feel competent to answer 
that question. I have seen it stated that a hen will 
not lay after she gets to be four or five years old. But 
two years ago there was a light Brahma hen at the 
Exhibition in Boston that was twelve years and three 
months old, and she laid three days out of the week. 
I have had a Light Brahma in my yard this year 
eight years old, and she laid some forty-odd eggs. I 
believe, therefore, that hens will lay until they are 
pretty old. I do not believe, as some do, that they 
will cease laying at four or five years of age, but as a 
rule, birds after they are three years old begin to fall 
off in the production of eggs. 

Question. Are not pullets the most economical 
kind to keep for eggs ? 

Mr. Felch: The second year appears to be the 
year of greatest profit. You may raise two chickens, — 
a pullet and cockerel, — and the day they are twelve 
months old the pullet will have supported herself and 
the cockerel, and if sold at the end of twelve months 



POULTRY CULTURE. 79 

that cockerel is net profit. You may base your calcu- 
lations of profits upon that and you will find it to be 
true. A Leghorn, when she commences to lay, will 
lay usually until she molts, and generally will not 
commence to lay again until the next spring. But you 
get the start of a year, or longer, before it comes to 
that, if she has good blood in her. 

QUESTION. If you were only keeping a few hens 
for eggs, what kind would you select ? 

Mr. Felch: If I were keeping hens for eggs 
alone, I should most certainly keep the Leghorn breed 
in preference to any other. Keep the pullets up to the 
time of molting, and then sell them and replace them. 

QUESTION. Have you had any experience in regard 
to the laying qualities of the Hamburg? 

Mr. Felch: The Hamburg family will lay as many 
e ggs, probably, as the Leghorn. They are handsome 
birds, and if any one has an eye for beauty, and wants 
a few handsome birds for eggs alone, I should recom- 
mend the Hamburg family. They are a little tender 
in raising, but like the Black Spanish they seem to 
become hardy afterward. They lay well. I have had 
Hamburgs that laid one hundred and fifty-one eggs in 
six months. That is recorded in the report of the Mid- 
dlesex South Agricultural Society for the year 1858, 
and it is also reported, I think, in the State Agricult- 
ural Report of that year. The Black Hamburg is, I 
believe, the best of the family, for their chickens are 
easily reared, and that, perhaps, is attributable to a 
cross. I think there is a Black Spanish cross that went 
into the original Golden Hamburg, that produced the 
Black Hamburg. The other varieties of the Hamburg 



80 POULTRY CULTURE. 

family are the Silver and Golden- Spangled and trie 
Silver and Golden-Penciled. The white and black are 
two varieties of that class produced within my recollec- 
tion. 

QUESTION. How long do you allow your chicks to 
run with the hen? Do you have many deformed, one- 
sided chickens ? I am troubled that way. 

Mr. Felch: I do not take the hen away until she 
weans the chicks herself ; yet it is as well to remove 
her to the laying house when the chicks are from five 
to seven weeks old, according to the season. I have 
the partings, or slats of my chicken coops, three inches 
apart, and when my Brahma chicks raise one or both 
wings to go in or out of the coop, I leave the door 
open, for in squeezing in and out through the openings 
between the slats they easily slip their hips down, thus 
making them one-sided, or deformed, as you have 
spoken of. I have seen an entire brood ruined by 
being reared beside a picket fence of one and one-half 
inch spaces. 

The foregoing discussion clearly shows the interest 
the farmers of the country are taking in this great 
question of poultry culture. They look upon it from a 
money point of view. They want to know how many 
eggs can be produced, and at what cost, and demand 
practical worth with exhibition excellence. 

The rule with all breeds should be to kill all the in- 
ferior specimens, whether they be male or female, and 
demand that the beautiful specimens be so in a double 
sense, " Handsome is as handsome does." 

If we breed from none but the most prolific layers 
we shall the more surely improve our stock in laying 




BRONZE GOBBLER 



3»7 




ROSE COMB BROWN LEGHORNS. 



POULTRY CULTURE. 81 

qualities. The policy of keeping all the females is a bad 
one ; they should be weeded out if they are poor layers. 

While the results quoted in the essay have been 
accomplished, and can be again, we can cut down the 
figures to a net profit of one dollar per head, and the 
margins are then even better than can be realized upon 
cattle or horses. 

There is no danger of over-stocking the market, for 
poultry seems to be a necessity. Our southern breth- 
ren are in a large measure dependent upon it in warm 
weather. In all seasons it is to be preferred to beef or 
mutton and it always rules higher in the market. 

So long as beef, mutton and pork remain at their 
present prices, and when (as is the fact) a pound of 
poultry can be raised for the same price per pound, we 
see no reason why it will not be a profitable business. 
Even in this season of low prices in other provisions 
we find fresh eggs quoted at twenty-seven to thirty 
cents per dozen, in August, and corn but seventy-five 
cents per bushel at retail. 

A bushel and one peck of corn, or its equivalent, 
will support a laying hen one year, and if she produces 
but eleven dozen of eggs, no more than is obtained 
from the unimproved sort, it will leave a margin of two 
dollars and thirty-six cents per head for the care of the 
flock, which would pay, we opine, as well as the major- 
ity of the professions. 

We would not counsel the use of mongrel stock, as 
breeders, under any circumstances, nor the use of de- 
formed specimens, only in the case of necessity. Even 
deformity caused by accident may have so shocked the 
nervous system as to affect the breeding. 



82 POULTRY CULTURE. 

We know of a case where a hen had her foot 
caught in a steel trap and, being in it some time 
before being liberated, had her nervous system so 
shocked that after the toes were amputated five-sixths 
of the chicks hatched from her eggs the following 
season were club-footed in the limb corresponding 
to the one mutilated on the dam. We know not all, 
nor even a small number, of like accidents would pro- 
duce a similar effect, but we cite the case to show that 
if an accident can affect the breeding how much more 
an hereditary deformity would affect it. 

Cross-bred fowls are, in the majority of cases, far 
more prolific as egg producers than the native, or even 
the thoroughbreds from which they were bred, and in 
all animal or vegetable life this will be found true. 
Therefore we must always produce them from the two 
thoroughbreds, for to breed from the cross will be to 
deteriorate. 




CHAPTER V. 



ON THE TREATMENT OF BREEDING-STOCK. 

A FEW general remarks as to repairing diseased or 
broken plumage, etc., may not come amiss. 
If in white birds, or in the white in parti-colored 
specimens, colored feathers appear, especially if black 
feathers appear in white, they will oftentimes, if 
pulled, be replaced by feathers true to the color of the 
breed. 

Young cockerels are often attacked by older birds 
and their plumage marred, in which case the feathers 
so injured grow slim and longer than the others. We 
have seen sickle feathers, corrugated along the quill and 
white in a black tail, removed, and afterward replaced 
by a perfectly black pair. We should not despair of 
an otherwise exhibition bird till we had removed these 
diseased and faulty feathers and given time for them 
to grow anew, for the majority of cases prove their 
restoration true to color. 

The only way we can keep our stock in presentable 
plumage during the breeding season is by watchfulness, 
and by removing all diseased and broken feathers, which 
will be replaced by new ones ; otherwise the fowls 
must wear their broken plumage till the molting season, 
and look badly. 

83 



84 POULTRY CULTURE. 

A Light Brahma having say from two to twenty 
black-tainted feathers in the back, if they are pulled, 
will often replace them with white ones. The process 
can be repeated till all are secured true to color. 

The best time to hatch the breeding-stock we be- 
lieve to be from May 20 to June 10. Such birds 
come in the time of year when they do not suffer from 
cold, and they grow rapidly and continually till mature. 

Cold weather comes on just in time to check their 
laying, and generally they will not have laid more than 
ten or twelve eggs before we are ready to use them, 
and we get them vigorous from the freshness of young 
productive life. Again, the adult fowls molt and rest, 
and generally have laid but few eggs before their eggs 
are needed for incubation. From such pullets, and 
these rested hens, we believe the best eggs for incuba- 
tion are procured. Early pullets that commence lay- 
ing in the fall, and lay through to March, sustaining a 
strain of six months' laying, we do not consider as good 
for the breeding-pen as the pullets named above. We 
believe the time and the way which approaches nearest 
nature's fitness of things the best to produce our breed- 
ing stock. 

The first forty eggs laid by a hen after molting, 
or the eleventh to the fiftieth egg laid by a pullet, are 
better, and the chicks from them prove larger and finer, 
than those laid afterward during the same breeding- 
season. 

Cockerels are the safest for winter breeding. A 
good plan is to use a cockerel till April I, and then 
turn the harem over to a young male coining two years 
old, from which to raise your breeding-stock, thus pro- 



POULTRY CULTURE. 87 

during them in the time of year nature intended. Such 
birds generally have more symmetry and merit than 
those unnaturally produced. 

There can be no definite rule for number of females 
to one male ; this the breeder's good sense must deter- 
mine. There must be enough so that copulation will 
not be accompanied with coercion. This number will 
be found to be in Asiatics, from eight to fifteen ; in 
Plymouth Rocks, ten to twenty; Houdans from ten to 
fifteen, and in Leghorns the number can still be in- 
creased. Where less numbers are kept the male should 
not be allowed to run with the females constantly. 

Experience teaches that twenty are better than two. 
Two years ago we had birds penned in numbers rang- 
ing from six to eighteen, and in every case the eggs 
from the larger number hatched the best. In one pen 
they utterly failed, and when we increased the number 
to fifteen birds nearly all the eggs hatched, and the 
progeny were largely female. 

The feed while the plumage is growing, both in 
chicks and molting fowls, has much to do with its 
color. Writers affirm that the reason wild birds are so 
stereotyped in color is because of their freedom to select 
just what food they need. We do not think it so much 
the kind as the supply of it, and protection from the 
injurious effects of the sun, that controls the color; nor 
do we acknowledge that the wild partridge is any more 
stereotyped in color and form than Partridge-Cochins. 
This question was raised at the Connecticut Poultry 
Exhibition, when H. F. Felch and H. S. Ball re- 
tired to the market and plucked feathers from different 
partridges and brought the same to compare with the 



88 POULTRY CULTURE. 

Cochins then on exhibition, which showed them to be 
no nearer uniform in plumage ; another fact, the part- 
ridges had both smooth and feathered legs. 

If a chick be starved, it will not only be dwarfed in 
stature but will fail in color. We have seen speckled 
half-starved Light Brahmas when put on generous diet 
slough their objectionable coats and grow plumage true 
to their kind. 

The finest specimens are those that do not cease to 
grow from the time they hatch till full maturity. A 
chick that suffers a severe check in its growth while 
young seldom proves a prize bird, and when hatched 
in winter provision should be made for producing 
green vegetable food in the way of green oats, to carry 
them through till the grass comes in the spring. 

The care of the flock does not consist entirely in 
furnishing it enough to eat, but watchful oversight, 
seeing to it that they do not huddle in large numbers 
in one place at night. We used to think that it was 
injurious to allow them to roost before six months of 
age, but we have altered our opinion and recommend 
it at the age of sixteen weeks. They should be induced 
to occupy low perches two inches wide, for there will 
not be one-half the injury arising from this as from the 
poisonous influences of their exhalations when crowded 
into small coops. 

If we take pains to cover the chicks whose weanin% 
comes in a cold season of the year by throwing a 
blanket over the coop to keep off the cold night air, or 
to coop the broods in the afternoon when cold east 
winds are blowing, we many times secure the season's 
success. By these little attentions at just the right 



POULTRY CULTURE. 89 

time we enhance our chances of winning at the winter 
exhibitions. 

We can assist nature to do her work perfectly. 
We do not consider it a sin to straighten a hare-lip or 
crossed eyes in our children, or, if the muscle of the 
leg be contracted, to use the knife, that they may walk 
without limping the remainder of their lives, nor do 
we consider these things injurious to reproduction. 
And taking this care of our own offspring wherein is 
the sin if by judicious means we secure perfect devel- 
opment in our chicks ? In nine cases in ten chicks 
hatch with a perfect organism ; now is not any work 
legitimate that secures its perfect development ? 
Should a chick hatch web-footed the web should be 
cut back to its proper structure, thus liberating the 
toes to grow in their legitimate angles. While the 
comb in Light Brahma chicks will hatch perfect, its 
peculiar shape makes it less likely to develop properly 
than a single comb. In many cases bad combs can be 
prevented by proper treatment. 

The first thing that nature does in case of a wound 
is to repair it. Therefore, if the middle division is 
seen to be growing too rapidly, the serrations of this 
division should be pricked with a sharp instrument so 
as to make them bleed. This process will check the 
growth of this division and allow the side divisions to 
grow into proportion with it. If the middle and one 
side seem to be growing faster than the other side, the 
same process of treatment applied to both will allow 
the weaker division to grow into proportion with them. 
An old cock may give a chick a severe peck on one 
side of the comb so as to turn it to one side. A cor- 



90 POULTRY CULTURE. 

responding wound on the other side will maintain it in 
its proper position. By this means we succeed in mak- 
ing the comb grow into proper shape. Is it not better 
to do so than to let it grow into an irregular, de- 
formed mass, and then turn butcher and cut and slash 
the comb, making a bad job of it, and receive the just 
censure of our fellow-breeders? Three-fourths of all 
the bad combs are the result of external causes and 
unnatural feeding to produce very large birds. 

The leg-feathering can be wonderfully assisted in 
its growth, and many a crooked toe saved, by pulling 
all foul feathers. The skin of the foot and leg is tough 
and the feathers oftentimes grow along under it from 
one-fourth to one-half an inch before penetrating the 
skin, thus causing the toe to turn in. We have pulled 
these feathers four times before succeeding in making 
them grow properly. 

The breeders and amateurs as a rule are too lazy 
to attend to all this minutiae (and the writer is as 
guilty as any one he knows, yet a guide-board may 
tell the way, if it does not go itself). 



CHAPTER VI. 



LOCATION. 

WE have in our introduction endeavored to show 
the magnitude, and create an interest, in the 
poultry culture of our country. To such as intend to 
make it a life business the selection of a location be- 
comes one of vast importance. Where man finds a 
healthy abode poultry may be expected to thrive. 
Yet a clay subsoil, unless the land be very rolling and 
all surface drainage complete, should be shunned; when 
flat and marshy, with no retreat from it, will always 
bring failure. A clay subsoil, if it be a slope to the 
southeast, south or southwest, terminating in a meadow 
lot through which a stream may run if underdrained, 
becomes one of the very best of situations upon which 
to raise poultry. All houses upon such land should be 
floored over, leaving an air space between it and the 
ground. At the very top of the elevation, if the land 
be trenched for 18 inches in depth beneath the under- 
pining, the same terminating in a drain, would enable 
you to dispense with the floor. Yet safety upon such 
soil demands a floor to all roosting and laying depart- 
ments. Such underdrained lands are strong, producing 
heavy crops of grass. Therefore they will support much 
larger numbers to the acre, and their heavy grass crops, 

91 



92 POULTRY CULTURE. 

while they furnish the forage for the fowls, consume 
more completely the dropping as plant food, and secure 
a healthy condition of things. A constant supply of 
grass does much more to keep the egg-basket full than 
many are willing to concede. 

Light soils are good, but demand far more work in 
cultivation, or the number kept upon the acre must be 
far less. We believe it far better to keep no more upon 
the land than it will furnish green food to than to con- 
fine large numbers and furnish the feed from other 
lands. If the land be light, oats must be cultivated for 
green food (we say oats, believing them best for this 
reason: they contain twenty-two per cent of muscle and 
three per cent of bone). 

The land needs cultivating also by the use of the 
horse-hoe to keep the surface fresh and clean from the 
collection of the dropping. This hoeing should be done 
regularly. When the vegetation fails to assimilate the 
dropping it generally kills out all vegetation. The sur- 
face becomes hard and sour. Cut into it and you dis- 
cover a thin green crust. Long confinement of fowls 
on such inclosures is fatal to a healthy condition and a 
high state of productiveness, and eggs laid by these 
fowls are to a large extent infertile. 

The old idea that any land is good enough to raise 
chickens on is a fallacy. Let one flock be grown on a 
rich soil, abundant in honeysuckle clover, and note the 
health and prime condition of plumage, the molting 
always complete. In contrast to this, see the occupants 
of a sandy hillside, where the grass crop is meager and 
sorrel abounds, in their faded spotted plumage, which 
indicates incomplete molting and light, thin condition. 



POULTRY CULTURE. 93 

In the one case they get insect life and vegetable food 
in abundance. In the other they depend upon their at- 
tendants to furnish it, which in many instances is not 
forthcoming. If this difference is discernible in the 
plumage, there will be equal difference in muscle also. 
We know this difference exists, and following it one 
gets less eggs by full twenty per cent from fowls grown 
on poor sandy soil. Land that will produce three 
tons of hay to the acre will support four times as many 
fowls as will an acre that produces but one ton. Land 
on which water stands should not be used except for 
geese and ducks. For them even a meadow lot, where 
the water does not reach the magnitude of a pond, is 
far better, for constant indulgence in water is by no 
means advantageous to ducks till six weeks old. When 
nature gives us a hillside of loam with gravel subsoil, 
inclining south to heavy soil, and terminating in a 
meadow lot there, in such we have the best of all loca- 
tions, for in such we have instant drainage from about 
our buildings, yet a soil that brings to the surface the 
earthworms every night, and as the season advances, 
even in summer, the fowls find in the meadow a cool 
forage ground rich in slugs and insect life. 

Have any of my readers watched from their chamber 
windows the chickens as they come from their coops 
at half past three in the morning, and deploy out into 
a skirmish line that sometimes covers acres, leav- 
ing the feed laid out for them the night before? See 
them return to the coop and a short season of brooding 
under the mother-wing, and wait the daylight to come 
out to their breakfast of grain. Why do they do 
this? Take your lantern some morning and take a 



94 POULTRY CULTURE. 

stroll with them, and see on your walk the earthworms 
laying at full length on the surface, also the insects, the 
beetles, the grasshoppers, cold and stiff in the cold dew, 
at the mercy of your flock of chicks. Kill some morning 
a cockerel that has taken this morning walk and you will 
find his crop well filled, and you will have the solution of 
the mystery and the origin of the old saw that " the 
early bird catches the worm." Again, watch just at 
twilight, after the chickens have eaten their evening 
meal of grain. All go on a grazing expedition, feeding 
upon grass as regularly as possible in your pasture lot. 
With these things before your very eyes you no longer 
hesitate as between rich and poor land as a location. 

If compelled to raise on poor land, then keep the 
horse-hoe at work. Sow the oats for green food, fur- 
nish fish and flesh and grain in abundance. Fowls will 
consume what is equivalent to twenty pounds of hay 
a year, and the acre that produces three tons, with the 
fall feed taken into account, will support four hundred 
fowls and keep green. Such luxuriant growth would con- 
sume all the dropping and save a vast amount of labor in 
cultivation of a soil so light as to support one hun- 
dred fowls only. To keep fowls without cultivation 
involves much more labor in the distribution of the 
food, for to feed ten thousand fowls on one hundred 
acres, or on twenty-five acres, will make quite an item 
in the labor account. Yet there are locations where a 
loam soil, having a subsoil of gravel, with sand be- 
neath all, would admit of houses as described below, — 
these houses the ends and back of which could be made 
with cement. 

In most of our pastures there are dry knolls and 



POULTRY CULTURE. 95 

southern sloping hillsides, in which excavations could 
be made fifteen by twenty-five feet, the ends and north 
sides walled up, leaving but the one side of the laying 
room and roof to be built of lumber; even the roof 
could be thatched, or earth-covered. All of which 
could be home-constructed, or by the employment of 
cheap labor. These habitations would be warmer in 
winter and cooler in summer. These quarters, located 
far enough apart to save the expense of fencing for 
yards, would save the labor of forage crops and all 
meat-food till the frost cut off the natural supply. 

No farmer should be excused from utilizing all 
such facilities adjacent to his building, which, with the 
barn-cellar and orchard, would in most cases enable 
him to keep at least two hundred and fifty fowls, all of 
which could be cared for by the younger members of 
the family, and the profits would secure older and 
abler help for the heavier work of the farm, while 
many a boy would be made a thinking, practical farmer, 
happy in his lot, who is now chafing under his hard 
home-life, waiting only for age to liberate him. 

The effect of geographical location we should not 
forget in this connection. He who thinks to succeed 
in poultry culture without almost eternal vigilance, 
and the practical application of the doctrine that pre- 
vention is far better than cure, had better never com- 
mence. Yet one who will put the same care and 
study, the same close attention and watchful business 
energy, into this calling as are employed by our mer- 
chant princes or bank presidents in their calling will 
surely succeed. He who trusts to luck in the majority 
of cases fails. We therefore do well to consider the 



96 POULTRY CULTURE. 

fact that the northern, middle and New England 
states are exempt from cholera, but that her cold, flat, 
wet lands engender roup and catarrhal affections. That 
along the shores of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans cholera 
is the exception and not the rule, and that there high 
lands are exempt in a large measure from roup. 
Where cleanliness in the quarters is maintained the 
salt sea breezes seem to have a salutary effect. The 
short intervals of snow in these reigons all help in the 
preservation of health and profits of the business. The 
balance of the states being not free from chicken 
cholera the breeders have to watch and strive for 
health by greater care, by keeping fewer fowls to- 
gether, and by more cultivation and the feeding of less 
corn, and free use of sulphur, to fight the competition 
of the other states having only the longer seasons, 
whereby to compete successfully. In fever and ague 
districts, fowls are more liable to suffer from cholera 
than in sections of the same county even that are free 
from it. Thus to him who would make poultry cult- 
ure a business the question of location becomes one of 
the greatest importance, and failing in a perfect loca- 
tion we must by artificial means and man's device con- 
vert it into such to a certain degree before we can 
hope to be successful. 



CHAPTER VII. 



BUILDINGS AND FURNISHINGS. 

IT is no part of our purpose to present plans which 
we would not use ourselves, but rather to present that 
one which we deem the best for all practical purposes. 
All buildings must in a measure conform to the neces- 
sities of the locations upon which they are reared. 
Therefore we can only present our theory, and leave 
the reader to use it as best he may, by remodeling his 
old houses or using our plan in his new structures. It 
has become a necessity that fowls must have exercise 
in the open air each and every day if we would be cer- 
tain their eggs will hatch in the winter months. And 
all broilers for the months of February to July must 
be hatched in the cold months of the year. One-half 
of the cause of eggs hatching poorly in March and 
April is the fact that the fowls have been housed 
closely all winter. 

Our cut represents the best and only plan so far 
published in which with the least trouble, in the warm 
portion of each day a sun and dust bath in the open 
air can be enjoyed by the fowls, and the balance of the 
day the same space can become additional house room. 
An open shed protected from wind and storm is the 
place of all others a fowl will select for the purpose. 
The cut we take by permission of the Ferris Publishing 

97 



98 POULTRY CULTURE. 

Co., from their work, the Wyandotte Fowl, it being our 
original idea. These open sheds, having a southern ex- 
posure protected from wind and storm, enable the 
fowls to enjoy the open air each day, by the attendant 
at 10 A. M. opening the front by swinging it inward, 
and thereby completing the partition which makes 
the inclosure of the laying and roosting room, while 
the balance of the house becomes an open shed, 
which as such the fowls enjoy until the sun begins to 
get into the west and the air becomes too cold, 
when the keeper returns the partition to the front, and 
our building becomes a house entire. In mild weather the 
partition can stand ajar, the better to air out the whole 
building. 

This plan represents a building 13x25, which, so far 
as the laying room goes, having the two-foot projec- 
tion, makes that room 15x15, and a shed 10x13. The 
front posts 7 feet, rear posts 5 feet, front roof 8^ feet, 
rear nj£ feet, the smaller door being hinged to the 
swinging front, the two covering ten feet, leaving three 
feet of stationary partition, which completes, with the 
door, the partition, when the building is divided into 
shed and house. This arrangement saves a vast 
amount of labor in shoveling snow or littering down in 
front of the ordinary fowl houses, and the fowls may 
enjoy the air, for they will not travel on snow if they 
can avoid it. 

Fowls may be housed closely all winter, and by high 
keeping be made to lay a large average number of 
eggs, but not one of them will hatch. This is why we 
urge this plan. If you are in the egg trade it will save 
you hundreds of disappointed purchasers. It will 




99 



POULTRY CULTURE. 101 

insure you a larger brood of chickens from the eggs 
you set at home. This is but the repetition of advice 
given ten years ago. In severe cold weather the plan 
gives us the whole in enlarged quarters made secure 
from the weather. In heavy rain storms the fowls are 
no longer forced to take shelter in the fence corners or 
under the cart, which only form a poor protection. 
Again, this plan puts the breeder in a position to sell 
eggs that will hatch all the winter through. There are 
many inquiries for eggs for the incubator trade during 
the cold months. If you anticipate running incubators 
yourself, to raise broilers by artificial means, then you 
cannot do without such a building. 

These houses can be built double, the whole being 
15x50 feet, a solid partition in the middle making two 
laying rooms 15x15 and a shed of 10x15 feet at each 
end of the house. Such houses built in rows, with a 
fence running from the front of the one to rear of the 
other, would secure the fowls in colonies of fifty each; 
the buildings being ten roods apart would secure 
their returning to their own quarters to lay and roost, 
— the plan we deem the best of all with which we are 
acquainted. If you desire others, there are works at 
twenty-five cents each in which you can have your 
choice of a hundred styles in architecture. But we 
present no other plan, for we know this will secure the 
best results. 

In the coldest sections of the country we would 
recommend they be constructed and finished by tack- 
ing tar felting on to the frame, then board in, and from 
the inside tack the lapped edges of felt to the board- 
ing. This would make it wind tight and warm enough 



102 POULTRY CULTURE. 

to defy an arctic winter. Built of matched spruce, the 
cost single is $85, and double $160 each. But as differ- 
ent localities will vary in cost we refrain from giving 
specifications ; each tenement will house fifty fowls in 
health and productive condition. 

The droppings from fowls are very poisonous, and 
it is very essential that they have thorough ventilation. 
At the same time we must not expose the flock to a 
direct draught of air. Fowls left to themselves will 
not stand in a draught, and when compelled to, they 
take cold as easily as does the human family. 

The ventilators should reach the floor. In winter, 
ventilate from within three inches of the floor, and in 
summer from both top and bottom of the room. The 
bad air falls and is drawn off from the bottom, and 
saves the heat made by the solar action by your glass 
fronts, and as the warm air rises for the same reason 
to ventilate from top we lower the temperature and 
make the room cool and comfortable. In the winter, 
when dull cold weather at times collects the congealed 
respiration from the fowls in an anchor frost, this is 
soon disposed of by burning a kerosene light for a 
short time, and the opening for a short time of the 
upper ventilation, and all that damp, chilly sense of 
feeling when visiting the house will be disposed of. 
Remember this and see to it in time to save you many 
cases of roup, and thereby keep up the egg production. 
A window 4x6 feet in the extension front and one 
5x3^ in the swinging front, the sill eighteen inches 
from the floor, will warm and light the rooms, dry out 
the gravel loam, which will help in the work of deodor- 
izing the dropping, enabling you to keep a larger num- 



POULTRY CULTURE. I03 

ber on the same space than otherwise. The plan of 
having the whole front constructed of glass is bad, for 
in that case the house becomes too warm in the d 
time and cools rapidly at night, making so mu 
change in the temperature as to work disastrously 
Even with the windows we recommend if in wintc 
shutters were used to close over them they would mak^ 
the house much warmer through the night. 

Avoid all permanent or box-made nests, which be- 
come harbors for lice. Avoid also the old plan of an 
inclined plane for roosts, for all the fowls will strive to 
occupy the highest perch, and many a fight and fall 
will be the result, which will vastly increase the list of 
casualties, while the low and level plan saves many 
from lameness and internal injury; for while a hen will 
walk up to her perch, if she has the chance she will in- 
variably fly down. Roosting low makes them less 
breachy; even the smaller breeds, if reared on low 
perches, will not require a fence more than four and a 
half to five feet high to fence them in. The floor of 
the house should be kept covered three to four inches 
deep with a coarse-fine gravel, not so fine as to be 
called sand, yet having a loam mixture in it. This will 
deodorize all the filth and stench, besides making a 
loose and soft substance to alight upon in descending 
from the roosts. 

Across the rear of the laying room construct a plat- 
form three and a-half feet wide, thirty inches from the 
floor, and one foot above the same make the roosts by 
having them extend from back to front across the plat- 
form, eleven short roosts three and a third feet each. 
This can be done by two stringers, one at the back, 



104 POULTRY CULTURE. 

hinged to the house, the other thirty inches forward 
furnished with legs one foot long, the whole to swing 
up while cleansing the platform, which should be done 
every morning where fifty fowls are kept in a flock, and 
not be left till afternoon. 

Why do I not have the roosts longwise ? A boy would 
say " Because." I say so to, for fowls will crowd and 
will roost very near the same place in the roost each 
night. These short roosts will hold but five birds. If 
two long roosts were put in longwise, they would all 
crowd for the back roost, and the front one would be 
used by those unable to get a foothold on the back 
one. Can you not see that such a plan is best ? Fowls 
are more sensitive than they are credited with being. 
This crowding will effect the egg-basket. One of my 
breeders who has bred Light Brahmas for me twelve years 
says : " When you come over here leave the dog at 
home, for the excitement caused by him among the 
hens costs me a dozen eggs every time he comes, and 
some soft-shell eggs laid at night upon the roost." So 
everything about your building that will conduce to a 
quiet and comfortable life means a gain for you in eggs. 
The width of these roosts should be about two and a 
half inches, the sharp corners rounded off. 

Under the platform it would be well to construct a 
rack to hold common nail kegs. Let them be laid on 
their sides with a stringer three inches wide against 
which the open end of the kegs may rest and face 
inward, so that the fowls will approach the nest from 
under the platform. The fifteen feet will enable you 
to get in twelve kegs, or nests. Make holes in the bot- 
tom large enough to admit the hand to gather the 



POULTRY CULTURE. 105 

eggs. The rack being portable the kegs can be re- 
moved at will to be scalded or lime-washed, to prevent 
lice from infesting them. The nests will be just high 
enough to cause the fowls to take a short spring to 
approach them, and as they step in they cover the 
nest ; having laid, they jump down and are away from 
them. Nests so low and easy of access that a fowl can 
stand upon the floor and reach the egg are conducive 
to egg-eating, while this plan, with one or two earthen 
nest eggs kept in the nest, will seldom bring about 
the evil. The plan gives a sense of security and 
secrecy. If you have only a village lot, and are limited 
in space, and the flock has from necessity to be con- 
fined upon the least possible amount of ground, each 
house and shed should have two yards, that one may 
be sowed with oats while the fowls occupy the other — 
and when the oats are four to five inches high, let the 
flock occupy this yard while the other is treated in like 
manner, thus furnishing the raw vegetable food so 
necessary to them. Besides, this treatment keeps the 
yard clean and sweet. These fowls, so yarded, will eat 
all, even scratching the roots out of the ground, giving 
them a needed exercise. 

Do not forget that if you would reap the best re- 
sults in eggs, and eggs that will hatch, that the closer 
you follow our advice in this matter the better you will 
be off. If you sow these yards but once in a season 
you may fairly calculate that your profit will be fifty 
cents on the dollar, and the death rate in your flock 
large. Go into a hen yard that is so small as to be 
barren, and cut down with a spade, and for about an 
inch of the crusted top you will find a dirty green mat- 



106 POULTRY CULTURE. 

ter, full of prison to the fowls. Do you wonder that 
they die of cnolera or suffer from scurvy legs when 
confined for months in such yards with no green food? 
Why should they be otherwise? And yet we keep 
them there and eat the fowls so confined. 

We are aware that small flocks give the owner a 
greater individual yield in eggs, but when we are 
building for their sole use, and catering for large 
numbers of them as a business, we can best do this in 
houses of two tenements for fifty each. Poultry-raising 
must of necessity become of more and more import- 
ance, and in view of all this we have recommended the 
building to that end. If 5,000 fowls are to be kept, it 
is an easy matter to construct fifty such houses. If 
you wish to limit your operations to a home flock, then 
build a small house on the same plan. 

To build for the use of growing chickens on the 
farm, or wherever the natural way is adhered to, which 
is of course the best way, we have but one plan to 
offer. We have to nearly grow the young stock to 
replace the old before we are ready to kill off the old 
fowls. These chickens from this necessity have to occupy 
their chicken quarters into the fall of the year; at least 
it is most convenient for us that they should. Many a 
breeder uses old three-cornered coops because they 
used to do so in old times; many know better, and are 
aware that the extra growth and merit in one season's 
crop of chickens would more than pay the cost of new 
ones, yet he will keep on making them do, knowing 
that the sooner he shall resort to comfortable quarters 
that all subsequent seasons the change will bring him 
a profit. 



POULTRY CULTURE. 



Our plan is to hatch enough chickens at one time 
that we may double up the broods and give twenty 
chicks to one hen to occupy the coops, as per cut 
below, being three feet wide at the base and five feet 
long, with thirty-inch posts, with a paling frame, the 
paling being three inches apart, used in the front while 
the hen is confined therein with her brood, the same 
being removed at weaning time and three roosts put in, 




MODEL COOP FOR TWENTY CHICKENS. 

as indicated by the three dark spots. In this house 
the twenty chickens can harbor till the fall. Five 
such coops as these would serve a colony of one hundred 
chickens if placed twenty-five feet apart, say upon 
a square, 30x30, with the odd one in the center. When 
the males are removed, at twelve weeks old, to be 
shipped as broilers, two of the coops could be removed 
to serve a later hatched colony, the three coops re- 
maining would be sufficient to accommodate the 
pullets till they were removed in the fall to the winter 
quarters made vacant by the killing of the old stock. 



108 POULTRY CULTURE. 

These quarters should be thoroughly cleansed with 
lime-wash, and fresh gravel and loam supplied to the 
floor to the depth of four inches, when they would soon 
repay your outlay by discounting in the shape of eggs. 

A single brood of chicks will thrive and take care 
of themselves. With care, one hundred can be reared 
in a flock, and all do well. But if more are to be 
reared care should be taken to confine those of the 
same age together — the February and March chickens 
in one field, April and May chickens in another, and 
those hatched later in a third. With such care each lot 
will be found to do well ; but if running all together 
the young ones will get trampled to death by the 
older ones. One hundred chickens hatched the same 
week, colonized upon one feeding lot, would all grow 
up an even lot. These colonies could be located so as 
to feed four hundred upon an acre of land, and the 
result be good. 

Smaller coops for village use, where one or two flocks 
are reared for home use, can be made thirty inches 
square, sides fifteen inches high, double roof, sides, end 
and roof made of matched board, except the front end, 
which may be palings three inches apart ; these will ac- 
commodate twelve to fourteen chickens till the fall. 
Many think anything will do for a chicken coop, and 
stakes driven in front of a barrel are resorted to regard- 
less as to how near one paling is to another. In confin- 
ing hens with their chickens the distance between the 
palings should be no nearer than to confine the hen, and 
when she weans her brood the door to the coop should 
be left open. The nailing on of the slats so near as to 
make it difficult for the chickens to squeeze through 



POULTRY CULTURE. 109 

is the fruitful cause of so many crooked, ill-formed 
fowls. We have seen an entire brood so deformed 
from being reared beside a picket fence. It is pleasant 
to see a bird grow up perfect. But this deformity- 
many times makes a difference of ten dollars in a man's 
purse at show time. Keep this in mind, my amateur 
leader, when building for the chickens. 

In these larger coops it will be seen they are fash- 
ioned with an awning front. The natural tendency of 
the chickens to stand outside the palings to feed makes 
this a necessity in wet weather, and it prevents the hot 
sun from making the coops uncomfortable in hot 
weather. He who looks out for these little comforts 
in building does more than he thinks toward filling his 
purse in the fall. It is the last point that wins the 
prizes. In the use of the same coops spoken of, if they 
can be placed under a shed it will pay. We may have 
four birds to score ninety-two points and bring us ten 
dollars each, but if by care and these little attentions 
we bring one up to ninety-five points and win over all, 
the price oftentimes reaches ten times that sum. One 
such bird pays for this extra care and building for their 
comfort. One thing is certain, we never reach this 
excellence when we are careless of the well-being and 
comfort of our growing stock. And it is fair to say 
the whole flock is correspondingly better if your best 
one has beaten in a fair competition your neighbor's 
best. 

We have no sympathy with the breeder who stands 
under a sun umbrella and watches his hens with their 
extended wings gasping for breath when he complains 
of the death-rate in his flock. Watch at ten to eleven 



110 POULTRY CULTURE. 

o'clock in a warm day and see the chickens and fowls 
retire to a shady spot and remain till four o'clock in 
the afternoon. If your yards are not furnished with 
shade trees then provide for shade by building open 
sheds. The expense will not be great and will prove 
to be most economical in the long run. In all build- 
ings for poultry it is not the question what a coop costs, 
but what is the difference between what good coops 
and the very best coop will cost. A coop is a necessity. 
If the better one will secure you ten more eggs in a 
year from each hen, then in building for fifty hens it is 
policy to build the best one at an additional cost of 
fifty dollars. For the investment brings a twenty per 
cent income on the same. We believe the best is the 
cheapest in the end. 

A building set apart for incubation is one of im- 
portance, yet it can be used for wintering males when 
not in use for hatching chickens. This can be any size 
one cares to make it, but it must be heated in winter 
to sixty degrees if you are to reap the best results. 
To build one convenient, and to accommodate the 
largest number possible, I should build 18x36 feet, 
with 7-foot posts, leaving a walk around the entire 
room 2y 2 feet wide, and a 3-foot walk down the middle. 
Between these walks I should build two tiers of setting 
rooms, which would give me 120 feet in length and 5^ 
feet in width. This would consist of a shelf on which 
to set the nest, and yard or dust-room to each of 
four feet. The room can be made in sections 4x4, in 
which three hens can dust as they leave the nest 
they occupy on the shelves spoken of, or one can 
carry the plan further and by partitions make each 



POULTRY CULTURE. Ill 

hen a dusting room of fifteen inches wide and four 
feet long. Let the breeder do as he pleases in this. 
The plan gives space for setting ninety-six hens at 
one time. The lower tier can be upon the ground, 
the tier over it, the platform could be covered by 
earth four inches deep and by sprinkling down these 
runs occasionally the heat of the room would preserve 
a humid atmosphere. The nest boxes should be fifteen 
inches square. Being portable, they can be taken away 
at will to be cleansed and made up new. If the house be 
nine-foot posted a third tier of these nest accommoda- 
tions could be added. Let the building end to the south, 
and glass four feet wide extend from sill to gable, the 
door in the north end. For a short time each day open 
door and window and have a draught of air through. 
To air it out in summer they could be left open and the 
room kept comfortable. In winter ventilate from the 
bottom, your ventilations reaching from floor to cupola. 
In heating this house let the temperature be forty at 
the bottom and sixty at the height of a man's head, 
which would be two feet above the second row of nests. 
If three tiers were put in we would let the temperature 
run down so that sixty degrees would register at the 
height of the third row of nests. 

If only the ground was used one could build the 
rows by frames of wire eighteen inches high only, and 
all in portable frames to hook together. So, also, can 
the partition be portable, where two tiers are in use, 
and when you hud hatched all the chickens for the 
season they could be taken down and packed away. 
This house in winter is a necessity if broilers are to be 
the business of the breeder. This house must be 



l\% POULTRY CULTURE. 

warmed. Why, there are not three hens in five that 
show a disposition to set before April 1st that will 
hatch a chicken, for the reason they have not heat 
enough to counteract the atmospheric influence and to 
hatch the eggs. The warming of this room reduces 
the atmospheric influence to summer heat, and leaves 
the heat of the hen to do the work. Nature times the 
incubating inclinations of the fowls and birds at a season 
when sixty degrees of Fahrenheit heat is the average 
temperature. This plan is the best as a saving of labor. 
If you will carry it out to setting two hens in one yard, 
dividing into thirty inch by four feet yards, there will 
be no trouble, and when they come off with their broods, 
as a rule, will agree. We would heat the house by 
means of a common hot-house boiler, running the 
waterpipe around the entire room, the boiler being 
stationed in the north end, at the door, and passing the 
pipe down the west side and returning on the east. 

These nests I would make up by a layer of carbolic 
lime in the bottom and hay chaff above, with as little 
hay or cut straw as would nicely form a nest, which 
should be made flat on the bottom (and by watchful- 
ness be kept so), the nest being large enough for 
the eggs to lay without crowding, the shape to be as 
near the shape of a well formed egg cut through from 
end to end. If there is a raiser who does not compre- 
hend my meaning, let him boil an egg hard and cut it 
in two, longways, the flat side will be the shape of the 
bottom of the nest, in miniature. If chaff cannot be 
had, then fill the boxes up with sandy loam two inches, 
and sprinkle the earth well with water, and spread a 
handful of carbolic lime over it and build the nest of 



POULTRY CULTURE. 113 

hay or straw, not using a large amount. The heat will 
draw the moisture — the moi< t heat so necessary for 
success. 

From November to March, even in these warmed 
houses, put but eleven eggs under a hen, unless she be 
of good size, when thirteen may be the number. After 
April 1st thirteen may be the uniform number used. 
Place all the nests on the outside, and feed from the 
middle passage, water and feed arranged so they can 
run their heads out through the slats to obtain it. 
These birds will invariably feed and drink before nine 
o'clock each morning, when all the droppings should be 
raked off by means of a fine rake and taken away, and 
the house have the airing out spoken of above. 

After April 1st the chicken houses designed for 
twenty chickens (see cut) could be utilized by putting 
in a row of three nests on the back side, making the 
nests on the ground, and a portable yard for dusting 
be attached, all being outdoors. When they hatch, the 
house should be thoroughly whitewashed and one of 
the hens left with twenty chickens, before spoken of. 

A very good mode of setting hens is to sink a barrel 
on its side one-third into the ground, filling up with 
earth even with the earth on the outside, using a small 
quantity of hay to form the nest, especially in early 
spring. This, you see, will prevent the cold air from 
reaching the eggs through the hay from the under side 
and chilling them, while the earth in the barrel becomes 
heated by the hen, which increases your chances for 
an early brood. Place one of the small chicken-coops 
described in the front of the barrel, and by the means of 
a slide-door admit the hen to and from the nest. The 



114 POULTRY CULTURE. 

coop becomes a feeding and dusting yard for her while 
sitting, and a home for her and her brood when hatched, 
besides preventing her from deserting her eggs. As 
the season approaches June and July pour into the 
barrel, before putting in the earth, a half-pailful of 
water. The heat of the hen will draw the moisture up 
and prevent too rapid evaporation in the eggs, and 
secure for you a better hatch. 

By setting an even number at a time and doubling 
up the broods you can reset the hens thus released 
(which generally do better the second time), by which 
means you secure eighteen clutches of chickens from 
twelve incubating hens, which will produce, as a rule, 
about one hundred and twenty-five chickens that will 
be marketable. The overplus will be found to not 
more than make good the casualties and deformities. 

This plan of hatching and rearing the chickens away 
from your fowl-houses releases them from and pre- 
vents the incubation of millions of lice, which are 
generally produced by setting the hens where they are 
in the habit of laying. If you wish to see every louse 
and red-spider louse, which is the same as the bed-bug 
for the human family, concentrated into twenty inches 
square, just allow a few hens to incubate in the laying 
room of your hen-houses. The day before the hens 
are to hatch, let the place of setting them be what it 
may, it will pay you to sprinkle the eggs and wet down 
about the nest, and to make sure that the nest is per- 
fectly flat. At this time the egg-shells are very brittle. 
If the nest is hollow, so all the eggs press toward the 
center, the chances are that there will be more or less 
killed in the nest and more or less eggs will be- 



POULTRY CULTURE. 115 

come crushed in, and the chicken prevented from 
liberating itself. The chicken first, by aid of a little 
cone-shaped nib on the beak, presses against the shell 
and chips a hole. Air begins then to inflate its 
lungs, and he in his struggle begins to turn in the shell, 
he all the time pressing this nib against the shell. In this 
way he cuts a seam around the shell, and when this is 
accomplished the shell falls in twain and the chicken 
comes to the outside world independent of all else but 
warmth and feed to secure its growth. 

If these shells become crushed in, then the chicken 
cannot turn in the shell, and it dies. The same is the 
result if the hen has set too constantly, and the chicken 
is dried in the shell, as it is cal 1 ~d. The last is helped 
by immersing the egg in warm water for a moment the 
day before they are due to hatch. Sometimes breeders 
chip a hole in the shell and thus remove the chicken. 
When this occurs the keeper should break the shell 
away from the opening, and if where the chicken has 
broken through the inner lining looks dry for about a 
circle of half an inch down then the chicken must be 
liberated. This is best done by crumbling the large end 
of the egg, then rupture the skin and roll it toward the 
other end to prevent bleeding ; liberate the head only 
and leave the chicken's body in the other half of the 
shell and place it under the hen again. If the hen has 
covered her eggs in a proper manner for twenty-one 
days, the morning of the twenty-second they should be 
examined and the shells broken, and if the chickens are 
alive they should be helped out, but as a rule those 
helped from the shell on or after the twenty-second day 
seldom live to amount to anything. The hen as a 



116 POULTRY CULTURE 

rule will remain on the nest after the chickens are 
hatched for twelve to twenty hours, or till the chickens 
nearly all come out from under her and show a disposi- 
tion to eat. Then she will leave her nest with her 
brood. If the hen is to be reset the chickens should be 
taken from her as fast as hatched and passed under the 
hen we intend to rear them, for when a hen once calls 
her brood from the nest she will seldom submit to be 
reset. 

Many rear their chickens artificially after hatching 
them by the natural means, and make each hen set for 
six to nine weeks, and even for twelve weeks has a hen 
been induced to remain on the nest. Turkeys are easily 
taught to do the work of incubation ; they are easily 
managed for that length of time. We think that even 
where artificial means are used no one should buy 
an incubator till they have first learned the lesson 
to rear artificially the chickens. This can be easily 
done by taking care of a season's flock hatched by 
hens, by the use of brooders, and buildings for their 
use, and as the broiler business commences in October 
one is ready for practical operation when chicken- 
hatching by natural means has closed. 

We have known of instances where hundreds of 
chickens have been reared during a winter when the 
only brooding facilities afforded them consisted of sev- 
eral wooden boxes lined with flannel or woolen carpet 
or old buffalo skin, the boxes being placed near a stove 
at night and in severe weather. There are many farm- 
ers who rear all their spring chickens in this way, 
and some of them sell several hundred dollars' worth 
every year. There is absolutely no obstacle to the 



POULTRY CULTURE. 117 

successful prosecution of this work, provided always 
that the chickens are given the proper treatment. If 
they have warmth, fresh air, cleanliness, freedom from 
vermin, gravelly sand to run on, a variety of food and a 
daily stipply of either chopped grass, oats, cabbage or let- 
tuce, they may be raised in any number desired. These 
conditions are absolutely essential. 

There can never be an artificial mother invented 
that will equal the mother hen, and when we consider 
the many failures of the hen to hatch her eggs in the 
early part of the season we can see of what value an 
incubator perfect in its work would be, for it makes 
every hen, inclined to sit, of far more than double her 
original value, for she can be furnished chicks to rear 
of double the number she would be able to hatch, and 
in cases of failure to hatch a full brood of twenty to 
thirty chicks can be supplied for her to rear. There is 
no artificial heat to compare with the breast and feath- 
ers of the hen. Yet the farmer's plan awakens an in- 
ventive genius for a brooder, and teaches us a lesson of 
not relying too much upon the brooder itself. We are 
aware that hens crush quite a percentage of the chick- 
ens in the nest. To obviate this all hens that have 
been sitting sixteen days on eggs can be relieved of 
them and the eggs placed in the incubator during the 
last three to five days of incubation, and that percent- 
age saved, thus making a good incubator of far more 
value as an auxiliary with the hens in this important 
work of reproduction. Our plan for a chicken house is 
different from all others we have examined, and our 
brooders different. But Mr. Tribon, of Brockton, Mass., 
has the same thing, to all intents and purposes only he 



118 



POULTRY CULTURE. 



uses a plain sheet of zinc instead of the water pans, 
relying on dry hot air, which we are not sure is just as 
well in the winter as to secure the moist heat over hot 
water, as per our plan of brooders. 



"7 ""1 1 •""" ' ~"T i 1 

I i i 1 ! 1 

1 i i ! ! i 


r ^) 


r a 


(l 


r >| 


r a 


C A 


r \ 


r > 


5X 12 


5X12 


5X12 


5X12 


5X12 


5X12 


5X12 


5X12 


vpy 


vRy 


\FU 


knqy 


\m) 


\ms 


W 


w 


HallW 


ay 3 ft. w 


de -6 inches lower than the Chicken Rooms 



Fig. 2 
GROUND PLAN FOR CHICKEN HOUSE. 





Fig. 3 



Fig. 4- 



A BROODER. 



Our chicken house is 15x40 feet in the main build- 
ing, cut up into a hallway (see ground plan), 3x40 feet, 
and six inches lower than the chicken rooms, eight in 
number, matching the eight wire projections 5x4 in 
front to enable the chicks to take the air at will. They 
should be induced to take advantage of them by feed- 




e 



119 



POULTRY CULTURE. 121 

ing them meat, exciting them to exercise while enjoy- 
ing the tidbits of their noon meal. Each of the 5x12 
foot rooms is furnished with a brooder (see Figs. 3 and 
4), the base (Fig. 3) being made square in front with a 
door to admit the lamp, the two sides and rear end 
being cut mitering, so as to have a base nine inches 
high. On this base rests a galvanized iron pan three- 
fourths of an inch deep, the rear flange wide enough to 
let through a tube of tin one and one-half inches in 
diameter, that all smoke may escape from as well as 
give draft to the lamp. Above the flange of the pan 
(by which means it it is held in its position) a strip one- 
half inch, or say three-fourths inches thick, and one 
inch wide is nailed, except on each side and end is left 
a gap of one inch, making an air-hole three-fourths by 
one inch (see Fig. 3.), and upon this rim rests the 
floor of the brooder one-half inch thick, thus leaving 
between the floor and the water in the pan an air-space 
one inch in height. In the center of brooder floor see 
tube two inches high and one and one-half inches in 
diameter that draws the hot air up from over the tank 
as it becomes warmed in its passage from the sides 
through the air-hole over the water, and it is radiated 
out over the chicks and escapes through the fringe of 
the brooder cover (Fig 4), the cover resting on the base 
(Fig. 3), as indicated by dotted lines. The brooder is 
heated by a kerosene lamp of the Diamond burner 
style. The base of brooder is 45x48 inches when it 
rests on the floor, and 30x36 on the floor of the 
brooder, the cover being 22x30 inches long. On a 
warm night the chicks will lay all round the cover on 
the rim of the floor outside, and for this reason we 



122 POULTRY CULTURE. 

make the cover smaller than the floor of the brooders. 
By our ground plan you see from the hallway these 
brooders (Fig. 2, A) are fitted into the chicken rooms 
so the floor of the brooder only rises two inches above 
the chick's earth floor ; this gives them easy access to 
the brooder. This we believe the best and cheapest 
brooder one can build, except Mr. Tribon's, of Brock- 
ton, spoken of. In winter we see no reason why it 
would not work as well, and come a trifle cheaper. 

These conveniences with the house is sufficient to rear 
four hundred chickens to four weeks old, when they can be 
removed to a house of like dimensions, which may be 
heated by a stove, and the chicks taught to go to roost 
on low roosts, as we do not believe in the use of the 
brooder more than four weeks. At the end of the four 
weeks in their second house they can be removed to the 
houses described before for growing stock and laying 
hens, with three houses like the one illustrated, using 
the brooder for four weeks in one only ; one has ac- 
commodation for the growing of twelve hundred broil- 
ers all the time, as at twelve weeks the males are ready 
for market and the females should be taken to their 
laying quarters. Fifty are kept in a colony through 
all these stages of growth. 

EVERY CORNER A DEATH TRAP. 

Print this in large letters and post it up in every 
house used for chicken raising. For this reason we 
represent all the chicken rooms with rounded corners, 
made so by sheet tin or straw board or leather-board or 
tar felting. Let the circle be as large as the middle of 
a flour-barrel. Chickens will huddle in a corner, and a 



POULTRY CULTURE. 123 

corner is a dangerous place to be crowded into; being 
unable to liberate themselves they go down and under, 
being deprived of air, and many are trampled to death. 
The care to dispose of the corners in these rearing de- 
partments will save you many dollars in the course of 
a year. 

These brooders will not do all the work alone. The 
house must be kept warm enough to keep the chickens 
from crowding the brooders. When the house is cool 
they will cling to the brooders. This cannot be a 
healthy condition of things. A stove will answer all 
purposes, for the brooders themselves will do much 
toward heating the house if the ventilation be prop- 
erly cared for. The house should be ventilated from 
the hall-way, it being the lowest place; yet it should 
be furnished with ventilation at the roof in seasons of 
wet, cold weather, that all dampness from roof by frost 
may be carried off. Keep the house at fifty degrees 
six inches from the floor. This would be sixty-five to 
seventy degrees at the height of a man's head. Re- 
member the chickens are compelled to stay on the 
floor. If this is done they will not use the 
brooders except as they come in from their out- 
door noon runs and at night. Thus they escape the 
unhealthy conditions that follow huddling, which is in- 
creased by a cold house. Two houses such as we have 
described, with an incubator of five hundred and sixty 
e gg capacity will enable a breeder to hatch and rear one 
hundred chickens a week. This will give him four weeks 
for each incubation, and only the hatching of about 
seventy-two per cent of reasonably fertile eggs — those 
that stand the tenth day test. This, it will be seen by 



124 POULTRY CULTURE. 

our experiment in the foregoing chapters, will be far 
below the work that others have accomplished, but a 
reasonable average and about that of the natural way 
experienced by the fowls themselves. 

All this care you must learn by experience, and, as 
we have said, it will cost you less for this experience if 
you furnish yourself with all these conveniences before 
buying the incubator. This getting experience with 
large numbers of chickens before we know how to 
creep has driven three-fourths of all who have under- 
taken it out of the business, and poultry culture has been 
condemned by them when it was owing to their own 
incapacity or want of experience that led to failure. 

My reader, if you have no money to put into the 
business, keep out of it, for poultry keeping is not a 
business to be run successfully without capital. When 
we say that poultry will pay the most for the amount 
of capital invested we do not mean it to be understood 
that you can make poultry pay with no capital. Con- 
stant watchfulness does the work. We have catered for 
fifty chickens in a brooder, because we think a woman 
can take care of twice if not three times as many as 
she can in larger broods, where five times that number 
run together. We believe also that the chickens will 
be larger. For the food consumed at the end of four 
months of age, if the increase of weight should be but 
one ounce each, how long will it take you to pay for 
the extra cost of building? Take your pencil and 
see what an item it will be to a man who rears but 
five thousand chickens a year. Three hundred and 
thirteen pounds of poultry meat per year will build quite 
a village of breeding-houses in the course of ten years. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



FEED AND CARE OF FOWLS. 

IN the closing of a previous chapter we left our 
reader with the chickens to be taken from the hatch- 
ing quarters. But we go back a step to consider the 
feed and care of the fowls to produce the eggs in the 
shell fit for incubating. We have given you our plans 
for houses. The fowls who occupy them may be fed 
with boiled vegetables (purslane, cabbage, squash, seed- 
cucumbers or potatoes), mashed with wheat-bran and 
cornmeal while hot, feeding the same at the morning 
meals in such quantities as will be eaten up by nine 
o'clock, allowing the flock to forage till four or five o'clock, 
when a full feed of small grain and a small portion of 
corn may be given to them, adding to the morning 
meal fresh ground scraps or meat in some form, three 
days in each week. This will be found sufficient till 
the frost prevents the further growing of forage crops ; 
then change the feed to what soft food they will eat up 
at the morning meal, — small grains, sunflower seed, 
etc., at noon, and what corn they will eat at evening. 
This will maintain the most even animal heat for the 
twenty-four hours ; it being health and heat that pro- 
duce the eggs, the hen being simply a machine which, 
if carefully run, must produce the egg or die. During 
the winter months, feed chopped cabbage and turnips, 

125 



126 POULTRY CULTURE. 

and rowen hay. Rowen clover is an excellent substi- 
tute for grass, and is the only thing we can find that 
will produce eggs that will make the golden sponge- 
cake in winter. 

It also preserves the plumage in all the brightness 
and beauty possible, and is a grand help toward pre- 
serving the vitality of the eggs for incubating pur- 
poses; nor must we forget to feed, during confinement, 
in the soft feed, as often as once each week, sulphur in 
doses of a dessertspoonful to ten hens. Pulverized 
charcoal will be found an excellent thing to occasion- 
ally feed with the soft food, or in a crushed form, for 
the fowls to go to at will, — charred grain being the 
very best form, but it is most expensive ; corn, roasted 
like coffee, being a nice way to furnish it. In a nut- 
shell, let the adults who are to produce the eggs we set 
be fed with vegetables, fish, flesh and grain daily, if con- 
venient to do so. Let the vegetables be mashed with 
excelsior meal. To care for the flocks, to get the best 
eggs and the largest number, is really a science. When 
one keeps a large number it is an easy matter to have 
a "fat hens coop" so-called. Eggs laid by an exceed- 
ingly fat hen seldom prove fertile. The keeper who is 
up to his business has two pens, which he calls the 
lean quarters and the fat pen. At night, as he goes his 
rounds, and feels of the birds to note their condition, 
he will notice one, It may be, or two — sometimes three, 
in a flock of twenty-five, that are excessively fat. These 
should be placed by themselves and fed with sulphur, 
wheat, bran and oats till reduced to a nice working 
order, when their eggs may be expected to hatch. 
Again, the keeper finds here and there a lean one; of 



POULTRY CULTURE. 



127 



these he makes a pen, to which he feeds meal, corn 
and fat-producing food till he betters their condition, 
and thus he shows himself master of his business, and 
will find in the end the profits on the right side of the 
ledger. Ventilation, feed and flesh all in perfect order, 
and there will be no grumbling because the birds look- 
shabby or that the eggs do not hatch. 





SILVER-SPANGLED HAMBURGS. 



CHAPTER IX. 



FROM SHELL TO GRIDDLE. 

IN treating this subject we have nothing new to 
offer beyond the experience of thirty years with 
the different breeds,, We know that regularity in 
feeding, protection from storm and cold winds, warm, 
well ventilated quarters, and wholesome, sweet food, all 
these are essential to success in poultry raising. Exer- 
cise in the open air a part of each day is an absolute 
necessity. If engaged in rearing fowls artificially you 
cannot be told too often that the chickens must go out 
of doors, if but for ten minutes each and every day ; 
that the houses must be kept warm enough to prevent 
their going to the brooder only as a child runs to the 
stove to warm as they come in from the sharp air of 
winter, or retire for the night. This, and the regular 
course of feeding which we now offer you in a bill of 
fare, is our course pursued from shell to griddle and 
the spit. 

BILL OF FARE. 

The first meal for chickens after being taken from 
the nest should be boiled eggs, chopped fine, shells 
and all, also baked corn cake or excelsior meal cake 
crumbled into scalded milk ; no fluid as drink but the 
scalded milk. After the first twenty-four hours, after 

129 



130 POULTRY CULTURE. 

their gizzards have become filled with egg-shell, gravel, 
etc., let their meal in the early morning be excelsior 
meal, bread and scalded milk; at ten o'clock granulated 
corn; at two o'clock the excelsior, bread and mflk, and at 
six o'clock canary seed, millet seed, and granulated 
corn. This if the hen be confined and the chickens 
have their liberty to find grass and insect food. Thus 
feed till two weeks old, when it will be found that few 
or any deaths will have occurred, and the chickens 
started well for rapid and vigorous growth. If the 
season be winter and we are raising them by artificial 
means — by brooders — and all food furnished to them 
in confined quarters, like those described in our 
chicken house and its brooders, we would have a rule 
by which the attendant should feed them each and 
every day, to-wit : after they were two weeks old, add- 
ing to the above mode of feeding till two weeks old, 
boiled beef or sheep's haslets, chopped fine, one meal 
per day ; also green oats raised in frames at the win- 
dows, cut fine. To take its place when short of the 
green oats, steamed rowen clover, chopped fine ; this, 
with the use of boiled fish, would supply the place of 
the green grass and such food natural for them in sum- 
mer, without which chickens cannot be reared. They 
must have vegetables, meat and grain, and have them 
every day, if good results are to follow. Chickens at 
two weeks old, thus started for us, we would continue 
the bill of fare, to-wit : 

MONDAY. 

Breakfast. — Excelsior meal, bread and milk. 
Ten o'Clock Meal.— Boiled meat, chopped fine, 
with steamed clover. 



POULTRY CULTURE. 131 

TWO O'CLOCK DINNER.— Excelsior meal, bread and 
milk. 

SUPPER. — Granulated corn, oats and barley. 

TUESDAY. 

BREAKFAST.— The broth in which meat was boiled, 
thickened while it was boiling (and when the meat was 
taken out) with excelsior meal. 

TEN O'CLOCK.— Chopped mangel wurzel beets, 
and after eating what they would, allow to finish fill- 
ing their crops with granulated corn. 

Two O'CLOCK DINNER. — The balance of the broth, 
mush and a pan of sour milk, if to be had, to pick at till 
five or six o'clock. 

Supper. — All the granulated corn, oats and wheat 
they would eat should be given. 

WEDNESDAY. 

Breakfast. — Fish chowder made palatable with 
salt and pepper, boiled potatoes, and thickened with 
cornmeal and shorts. 

Ten O'CLOCK.— Oats and wheat, and all the steamed 
clover or green chopped oats they would eat. 

DINNER. — Cracked corn and balance of the chowder 
if not wholly disposed of at the morning meal. 

SUPPER. — Cracked corn and barley. 

THURSDAY. 

BREAKFAST. — Chopped sheeps' haslets and warm 
mush of wheat, bran and cornmeal. 

TEN O'CLOCK. — Cracked corn and wheat. 



132 POULTRY CULTURE. 

DINNER. — All the steamed clover they would eat 
and as dessert what excelsior meal cake they would 
dispose of. 

Supper. — Cracked corn and oats. Give sour milk in 
a pan to go to at will. 

FRIDAY. 

Breakfast. — The meat soup thickened with excel- 
sior meal. 

Ten O'CLOCK. — Green oats, chopped onions and 
light feed of granulated corn. 

Dinner. — Balance of the broth, mush and barley 
to finish up. 

Supper. — Cracked corn and wheat. 

SATURDAY. 

Breakfast. — Raw chopped meat and excelsior 
meal mush, scalded and fed warm. 

Ten O'CLOCK. — Chopped cabbage, lettuce and tur- 
nips, or mangel wurzels, throwing then a little granu- 
lated corn. 

Dinner. — Excelsior mush with barley. 

Supper. — Granulated corn and oats. 

SUNDAY. 

BREAKFAST. — Fish chowder, warm (made as above). 

Ten O'CLOCK. — Steamed rowen clover and barley. 

Dinner. — Excelsior meal cake and scalded milk. 

Supper. — Cracked corn and wheat with sour milk 
ad libitum. 

It-is not absolutely necessary to bake excelsior for 
them after the chickens are two weeks old. It may be 



POULTRY CULTURE. 133 

scalded, but we think it pays to bake it. We make 
the excelsior meal by grinding into a fine meal in the 
following proportions : twenty pounds of corn, fifteen 
pounds of oats, ten pounds of barley, ten pounds of 
wheat bran. We make the cakes by taking one quart 
of sour milk or buttermilk, adding a little salt and 
molasses, one quart of water in which a large heaping 
teaspoonful of saleratus has been dissolved, then thicken 
all with the excelsior meal to a little thicker bat- 
ter than your wife does for corn cakes. Then bake in 
shallow pans till thoroughly cooked. We believe a 
well appointed kitchen and brick oven pays, and in the 
baking of this food enough for a week can be cooked 
at a time. Our brick oven should be heated once a 
week, when the sheeps haslets could be baked so 
they will chop easily on baking day: but if steam 
boilers are used the food can all be steamed easier. 
Granulated corn we secure by first grinding the corn 
into a coarse meal and bolting out the flour that comes 
from the chit, so-called, or endosperm. Oat groats 
or steamed oats may be fed dry; this is expensive, 
but during the first two weeks will be a very nice food 
for them. After continuing the bill of fare described 
from two weeks till eight weeks old, the chickens can 
be taken to the fowl quarters, and enter on three 
meals per day, which can be what any grown fowl 
would eat. But vegetable food and meat food must 
be regularly given, for so long as muscle and bone are 
growing we must cater for them and furnish muscle 
and bone-growing material. 

CORN furnishes eleven per cent only of muscle and 
one per cent of bone. 



134 POULTRY CULTURE. 

Wheat, 15 per cent of muscle, 1 per cent of bone. 

Barley, 17 per cent muscle, 2 per cent bone. 

Oats, 22 per cent muscle, 3 per cent bone. 

Beans, 22 per cent muscle, no bone but rich in 
nerve tissue. 

Thus we have in the excelsior meal feed 17 per cent 
of muscle-growing material and ife per cent of bone- 
growing substance. This excelsior meal feed has the 
praise of all who have used it, and when we assert that 
hens lay 20 per cent more eggs, and that Asiatics will 
weigh one pound more at twelve weeks old by its use 
in baked cakes and scalded milk, we but state a fact 
that can be vouched for. But we are asked : Why be 
at the trouble of making this meal when we can feed 
these different grains from day to day? We answer by 
saying, You will not take the pains to feed them 
every day, and in the proportion named. We all know 
that in plant life it is necessary for thrift and growth 
and a full crop that the ground in which it is planted 
must contain the constituents that go to make up the 
plant we would raise ; that if but one of the ingredi- 
ents be wanting that growth ceases, — so it is in this 
excelsior meal. The fact that more eggs are secured 
and larger chickens grown by its use, over the old farm 
way of raising them, should be the one fact to secure 
its use. Let the gain be but two ounces each on five 
thousand chickens in a year and we have six hundred 
and sixty-six pounds of broilers, which, at forty cents 
per pound, gives us the net sum of $266.40, which will 
pay pretty well for making what bread we feed to them 
before they are twelve we^ks old. 

Again, we cook the food and it is kept sweet until 



POULTRY CULTURE. 135 

eaten up. No sour pans and fermenting food lying 
about. The old water-and-meal dough that in one 
hour in the sun commences to ferment, the old boards 
and ground, sour as can be, the continued eating of 
this sour mixture off the sour boards and ground, dis- 
turbed state of the bowels, acrid discharges, diarrhoea, 
and death, are all prevented and a rapid growth in- 
stead secured, because the chickens are healthy and 
the pullets raised to lay earlier in life, and to be 
better layers through life for your trouble. Is 
the picture overdrawn? Try the excelsior meal, and 
if we have made a mistake, notify us. We are aware 
that seed food is the natural food for fowls, and for this 
reason we recommend the granulated corn, for it can 
be fed dry with the millet and canary seed to fill their 
crops at night, as we give the adults corn and grain to 
retire on, and substituting the larger grains as they 
orow to be able to swallow and masticate them. We 
are sensible that raw meat can be fed in such quanti- 
ties as to be unwholesome for them. At liberty in the 
summer time they secure all that is necessary till frost 
comes and closes the earth and prevents the earth- 
worms coming to the surface, and cuts off the insect 
supply, when we must furnish it to them in the shape 
of flesh and fish in a reasonable supply. We have tried 
to designate what that should be in our bill of fare. 

In keeping large numbers of fowls it is easy to cater 
as indicated in the foregoing. Milk is a whole food in 
itself, and where one lives near a creamery skim milk 
and buttermilk can be had at from eight to fourteen 
cents per can. We would keep it on hand for daily use 
even at the highest price named. 



136 POULTRY CULTURE. 

As soon as the males are large enough to weigh 
three pounds to the pair take them to suitable fatting 
pens, furnished with clean gravel, and feed four times a 
day on corn and barley-meal and pork scraps scalded 
together, also corn and barley whole, with crushed 
charcoal in a box, that they may help themselves ; give 
one feed a day of chopped celery and whole corn ; 
darken this coop for two hours after feeding. In ten 
to fourteen days they will be plump and weigh four 
pounds to the pair, and be appreciated by our seaside 
epicures. 

If we are to make roasters of them, if Plymouth 
Rock, grow to five months old, if Brahma, to six and a 
half months old, then shut them up for a two weeks' 
fattening process, as spoken of above, when they will be 
surely first-class roasters. 

As the pullets are to be kept for egg producers, a 
different course should be pursued. We believe first 
in selecting the best layers as stock birds ; we also 
believe they can be reared to be better layers by feeding 
almost wholly muscle and bone material, and avoiding 
all fat-producing food. When eight weeks old let them 
have all the exercise they can be induced to take ; let 
their food be milk, wheat, flesh, fish, and constant 
supply of green vegetable food, and you will find they 
will commence earlier to lay and be the better and 
more prolific egg-machines, for you built them into such 
a structure. Note the difference in the number of eggs 
laid by such a flock as compared with the pullets bred 
] :.^!iazard, and who have roughed it for an existence 
up to six months old. 

Through all this course see to it that all drinking- 



POULTRY CULTURE. 137 

pans are kept clean and that the water be changed at 
the very least once each day. We believe it will pay 
you to do it twice, morning and at four o'clock. Roup 
of itself is not contagious, only as through the drinking 
vessels. It is therefore advisable to have a hospital, 
to which remove all ailing stock. If you do not care to 
doctor them, kill all sick and ailing specimens on 
their discovery. When the chickens reach an age from 
sixteen to twenty-six weeks old, — classing the breed, to 
wit : the Leghorns and other small breed, sixteen to 
twenty weeks ; Plymouth Rock and other middle size 
fowls at eighteen to twenty-four weeks, and Asiatics 
at twenty -six weeks old, — they will be seen to be 
dropping their hackle and tail feathers. At this indi- 
cation be on the look out for what we term distemper, 
which seems as sure to come as measles with children. 
They show very red in face and comb, they act in a 
listless manner, showing a disposition to sit on the 
roost or ground, and move exceedingly slow. As this 
falling of feathers becomes apparent, put at the ratio 
of two grains of bromide of potassium in the water 
they would naturally drink in a day, every other day 
for a fortnight, when the trouble will be disposed of, 
many being prevented from having it at all, others 
having it lightly. The disease is generally followed by 
thirst, which may be adjusted by a dose of from one and 
a-half to three grains, as the thirst compels or induces 
them to drink. They generally eat but little while the 
trouble lasts, which will be about three days, when 
they return to their food and all is over. Bad cases, 
where the face swells and the nostrils run, will make it 
necessary to inject into them by the aid of a crown 



138 POULTRY CULTURE. 

bottom oil filler, kerosene oil, and the thrc-.it should be 
gargled with the same, when it will be found all that is 
necessary to ward off the roup in nineteen cases in 
twenty, and then the twentieth case can be removed 
as recommended in roup. 

While our bill of fare and care for chickens from 
shell to griddle will apply to both the natural and arti- 
ficial rearing of them, many of my readers will care 
only to raise them to supply home consumption, and 
perhaps some few early chickens that they may show 
them at their fall fairs. Let this be as it may, it is 
never advisable to hatch them till they will be able to 
have quarters on the ground, when they will get the 
young grass by the time they are four weeks old, for 
they will certainly have rheumatism and prove worth- 
less. If you hatch them earlier than this you must 
sow frames of oats in your kitchen windows, if you 
have no hot-house, that the green oats may be had for 
them each day as a substitute for the grass. These 
frames, set upon the stove and warmed through, will in- 
crease the growth of the oats, and a frame 20x30 
inches will' raise oats enough for a brood till the grass 
comes in the spring. We are too many times apt to 
believe we can get along without this green food, or a 
substitute. But to make sure of success, one should 
have an acre or so of clover, which can be cut three 
times by cutting when, say, six to eight inches high, 
just before it blossoms — left to wilt in the sun and 
finished drying in the barn lofts. In this way secure a 
sufficient crop to make it serve you till you have 
enough for the uses heretofore described. To enable 
your customer for your egg to make the golden-colored 



POULTRY CULTURE. 



139 



custard will be an inducement for them to remain your 
customers ; and remember this clover alone will do 
this, fed to hens in winter. Again, be sure of this crop. 




BLACK COCHINS. 



CHAPTER X. 



ARTIFICIAL INCUBATION. 

TO say that the capabilities of poultry husoandry 
have not been even dreamed of, could the artificial 
hatching and raising of the chickens for broilers be 
demonstrated as practical, none will deny. There is 
actually no limit to the industry. Until 1884 no one 
can claim the artificial plan as having proved a success. 
The ever-increasing demand of our city hotels and res- 
taurants, the rich families, and continual increase in 
our summer resorts, has proved immense, and the de- 
mand of the future for broilers, who shall estimate what 
it will be? But whoever has seen a demand in the 
country that did not create a supply? There is no 
other resource than that artificial incubation and rear- 
ing of the chickens must meet this demand. The 
question is asked almost daily, " Is there an incubator 
that is reliable in the hands of common people?" We 
answer that in the hands of seventy-five per cent of the 
human race, No. Is there an incubator that a man or 
woman can be taught to run successfully? We answer, 
Yes. And here is the first lesson to be taught, that 
ordinary women and children cannot run incubators. 
All the incubator makers up to one year ago have as- 
serted that " any woman or child can run it." They 

140 



POULTRY CULTURE. 141 

have deserved defeat, and their incubator has been 
worthy only of condemnation. It has been the rock 
on which their enterprise has failed. We believe there 
are incubators that can be run by intelligent men and 
women, but there are none that can be run successfully 
by people who have not come to the age of judgment, 
for it is safe to say not one incubator in forty that have 
been purchased has been run the second season. And 
there is not an incubator put upon the market that can 
be run successfully by the printed rules sent out with 
it. We made this assertion to one of the most success- 
ful incubator manufacturers, and it was not disputed. 
The assertion is far from being a bold one, when made 
against the incubators collectively. Yet we believe 
"The Year" and the " Machine " have come when we 
may be said to be looking upon the dawn of practical 
artificial poultry culture. Let the incubator be what 
make it may, the operator must love the work, learn 
every piece and adaptability of its mechanism. He 
may with profit be well schooled in embryology, the 
influence of the atmosphere upon the eggs and its 
work in connection with evaporation, the humidity of 
the heat, the growth and increase of animal heat en- 
gendered in the shells in conjunction with the temper- 
ature surrounding the machine externally, the regula- 
tion of the heat applied by the lamps or stoves. There 
is not one of them all that does not fluctuate very 
much, and each hour has to be watched and provided 
for. The attendant alone is responsible for all this. 
No child can do this, and not five per cent of the busi- 
ness men and acknowledged smart women we meet can 
do it. When the attendant becomes an expert he so 



142 POULTRY CULTURE. 

controls, as many have become able to do, these in- 
fluences by the sense of feeling, to wit : putting his 
hand into the incubator and judging by the feeling, 
and not by looking at the thermometer, having become 
so to speak a living thermometer. Then the machine 
is safe in such hands ; such persons can be said to be 
masters of the situation. Eternal vigilance has been 
the price paid for this knowledge. With such intelli- 
gence to control them may it be said that we have in 
this year of our Lord, 1885, incubators that contain 
within themselves the conditions nature furnishes for 
hatching eggs. The egg is one of the most beautiful 
of creations; yet how much depends upon the condi- 
tion and care of the hen that laid it whether it ever 
becomes a chicken. 

To the careless observer it consists of but two ele- 
ments within the shell, the yelk and the surrounding 
albumen. Yet the careful student finds within these a 
multiplicity of features and conditions quite beyond 
the vision of the ordinary experimenter. 

Now to study an egg requires a trained hand and 
eye. It also requires in the student a knowlege of an- 
atomy, and a skillful manipulation of the microscope. 

As the embryo chicken advances in growth and 
perfection, it is necessary that every phase and re- 
quirement of its embryohood should be studied and 
understood. 

Professors Huxley, Agassiz, Foster, Balfour, Bisch- 
off, Dollinger and Karl Ernst Von Baer, have de- 
voted years to the study of the egg, and to their 
scientific labors we owe most of our knowledge of 
embryology. 



POULTRY CULTURE. 143 

Their studies were confined entirely to the physio- 
logical life of the chick, and none of them pursued 
their labors to a utilitarian end ; that is, they worked 
as scientists, not as inventors. Yet all knowledge 
possible does not come amiss. 

The greatest source of failure has been the endeavor 
to make them self-regulating. Electricity has proved 
too delicate, and therefore too treacherous a means, and 
the temperature has fluctuated. Under the hen 105 
is the extreme the eggs can reach ; and experience has 
shown that if incubators run above 106 during incuba- 
tion there will be a corresponding mortality; that if the 
temperature goes to 1 1 5 degrees it may not decrease the 
number hatched, yet it will cause a mortality among 
the chickens from twenty-five to sixty per cent. When 
the machines run evenly, never below 99 or above 105, 
or in the use of incubator thermometers the heat be 
maintained at 103 to 106 (they being gauged three 
degrees high), then the mortality would not be beyond 
three per cent over those hatched by the mother hen, 
and, the same care exercised in the rearing of them, one 
would have to be a keen observer to see any difference 
between the incubator and naturally hatched one. It 
is fair also to say, when the machine is allowed to run 
so high that a certain per cent in increase in mortality 
is discernible, that the chickens that live are impaired 
in a like ratio as compared to those hatched and raised 
in the old way. 

As these chickens advance* in the embryotic life 
they engender animal heat. This increases each day 
from the tenth to the twenty-first, when they break the 
shell. This demands the attention of the man in 



144 POULTRY CULTURE. 

charge, and a constant change in the means of regu- 
lating the incubator, and should be attended to every 
sixteen hours, to say the least. Then how foolish it is 
to say a machine can run alone. An incubator that 
hatched its chickens at 105 degrees, the moment the 
chickens are removed from it the temperature runs 
down to 92. This shows that the chicks themselves 
influence the heat twelve to thirteen degrees, and a 
machine left to run itself would, when taking into it the 
same amount of air, reach 117 degrees. If the regulator 
prevented it by a larger amount of air admitted, the 
moisture in the machine would become exhausted, 
and the chickens dry in the shell and fail to hatch 
at all. It is as the operator becomes an expert and 
able to control all these complications that he or she 
becomes valuable ; and the day is not far distant when 
such experts will command from $1,000 to $3,000 a 
year, for the poultry men have paid out all the money 
they propose to for crude help on incubators ; and the 
incubator that in the hands of even these experts will 
hatch even ten per cent more than its competitors will 
be the one to be used to the exclusion of all others. We 
have been slow to recommend any particular incubator, 
but for practical use the production of broilers in April 
to September 1st makes incubators a necessity. The 
eggs must be hatched at a time of year from November 
to March, when hens will not sit. We kick against 
the pricks no longer, and say the time has come for 
a reliable incubator, and experts in the form of intelli- 
gent women to run them and to care for the chickens 
hatched by them. Women, when interested in the 
work, are better than men. We have tried to show 



POULTRY CULTURE. 



145 



you the danger of crowding by the young chickens, 
but ducks can be raised artificially with far less danger 
in this respect. They can be grown in larger numbers 
on the same ground and in flocks of from two to three 
hundred with less danger of death by suffocation. The 
best duck record we have any knowledge of was by the 
use of the Monarch incubator, March I, 1885. One tray 
was filled with duck eggs ; when tested it gave sixty- 
seven fertile eggs, of which sixty-five hatched. May 16th, 
two trays were filled with duck eggs and put in another 




MONARCH INCUBATOR. 

Monarch machine; 168 eggs proved fertile, and 164 
e gg s gave us ducks. At the next trial the whole 
incubator was used, and from the 379 fertile eggs 362 
ducklings came forth. It then being too late for 
broilers the machines were used (four of them) solely 
for duck eggs as fast as thirty-five ducks could furnish 
them, till at the present writing 3,000 ducklings can be 
seen upon this farm of James Rankin. Up to the time 
1,800 were hatched, the oldest being but ten weeks old, 
only three ducklings had died from any cause whatever. 
At this time the oldest were being marketed and 



146 POULTRY CULTURE. 

weighing from near eight to eleven pounds to the pair. 
The growth was surprising. The last hatch was July 10, 
when 260 ducklings were hatched from 278 fertile eggs. 
Thus has the percentage been from ninety-two to as 
high as ninety-seven per cent of the fertile duck eggs. 
These green ducks, as they are called, started off at 
$3.00 a pair in June, selling now (July 17) at $2.00 a pair. 
In the meantime we have been marketing eighty pair a 
week, the average age being nine weeks old and aver- 
age price up to present writing being about $2.40 per 
pair, and their cost twenty-six cents per head. Quite a 
profit for a four-months' business. You can put these 
young ducks into the brooding houses in lots of one 
hundred and fifty each ; they need the brooders only 
about ten days. Their first food should be the boiled 
infertile eggs, boiled hard and mixed with an equal 
amount of excelsior meal bread crumbs — the whole 
peppered a little with cayenne pepper — and scalded 
milk to drink, putting the milk in a fountain so they 
can only put in their beaks to drink; after the first two 
or three days the baked excelsior meal bread and milk 
can be abandoned, and cornmeal, two parts, oatmeal, one 
part, and wheat bran, one part, with seven to ten per cent 
ground beef scraps, scalded and let soak six to twelve 
hours. This whole mixture can be scalded or mixed 
with skim milk. Feed for first four weeks five times per 
day — three times per day afterward — boiled potatoes 
or other vegetables mashed with ground meal and 
scraps. Ducklings need more meat and vegetables than 
do chickens. When fattening them use milk for drink 
and celery chopped fine for the last week if you wish to 
give them the wild celery flavor of the wild mallard. 



POULTRY CULTURE. 14? 

The Pekin duck was used in the foregoing experi- 
ment. During all this time these young ducks have had 
only water to drink given to th^m in fountain drinking 
vessels in which they could only put their beak. The 
very young duck should be confined in grass runs say 
20x150 feet. When six weeks old they may have 
a field large enough to keep green. They graze like 
cattle, and grass and vegetables must be furnished 
them constantly. 

Mr. Buffington, on seeing the success above stated, 
put 400 eggs into his Monarch incubator. How many 
infertile eggs were taken out on testing day we did not 
learn, but 323 ducks were hatched and doing well. 
We say so far as ducks are concerned artificial hatch- 
ing and rearing is a success, and their growth rapid and 
the ducklings larger than those hatched and left to 
the natural care of mother ducks. That chickens are 
being raised for broilers successfully we are compelled 
to acknowledge, and we say that while heretofore we 
have been no friend of or believer in incubators we wish 
to be understood that at least we are no longer preju- 
diced, and believe in the possibility that with experts to 
run them they are the only means by which the broiler 
business can be carried on successfully. We have 
cited the use of the Monarch incubator for the rea- 
son that the foregoing has been achieved by it and we 
believe it less complicated and easier regulated and a 
safe machine in the hands of people of general intelli- 
gence. Other incubators are successful, but not being 
personally acquainted with or knowing of experiments 
resulting from them we speak only of this one. 

We give this experiment in duck raising for the 



148 POULTRY CULTURE. 

reason that it is new, and a means whereby the fast de- 
cline in the wild duck and game supply of the country 
in our opinion is to become a substitute. The ~st 
season thousands of these green ducklings, celery and 
milk and barley fattened, have caused the lips of many 
an epicure to smack, with the accompanying assertion 
that they gave unmistakable evidence of their feeding 
upon young wild celery. The fact is, these ducklings 
so raised and nicely cooked are the best meat that 
wears feathers, and he who has never eaten one so 
reared and fattened has yet to learn what is the finest 
of all poultry. 

To treat of the subject of artificial incubation in an 
exhaustive manner was not our intention. The care of 
chickens artificially we have dealt with in a previous 
chapter, and have expressed all that need be said. The 
use of incubators from October to March 1st for chick- 
ens as broilers, and their use for green ducks from March 
to July, seems to double the poulterer's time and facili- 
ties in their use. May the years to come be as fruitful of 
improvement as have the last three in this direction, 
and poultry culture will maintain its supremacy as an 
agricultural industry. 




CHAPTER XL 



DISEASES OF FOWLS. 
THEIR MEDICAL TREATMENT. 

WE shrink from writing upon this subject, for we 
are not an M.D., and we only give our views 
upon and treatment of a few of the most fatal diseases 
that we have had occasion to deal with. 

We believe in prevention, and when fowls are sick, 
in extermination, more than in doctoring. When fowls 
have their liberty they are seldom ill, and when they 
are confined, if we are careful to furnish a good supply 
of vegetable food, health generally attends them. 

In most of the fatal diseases there is a poisonous 
fungus growth in the blood. Fowls never perspire, and 
the heart beats one hundred and fifty times per minute. 
The evils that are easily thrown off by perspiration 
with them have to be exhaled by respiration, and as a 
result we find the seat of nearly all the fatal diseases to 
be in the head, throat and lungs. Rapid respiration and 
circulation therefore become necessary to expel the 
vapory excretions. 

The chanticleer of the farm -yard whose liberty is not 
proscribed will have a battle every week and not seem 
the worse for it, while in a similar instance one kept in 

149 - 



150 POULTRY CULTURE. 

a poorly ventilated house, and fed upon unwholesome 
food, will suffer from inflammation and canker, and in 
very many cases death will follow. And why? Because 
the blood is poor and even poisoned, and unable to do 
the work of repairing the damage until it has thrown 
off the poison from which it is suffering. The former, 
rich in a healthy circulation, commences the work of 
recuperation the moment the wounds of the battle 
stop bleeding. 

We are all aware that iron is one of the very best 
of blood tonics, and if we but observe we shall see that 
fowls kept upon an iron and sulphur charged soil are 
generally more healthy and show better luster in their 
plumage than those kept upon a dry and arid plain. 
The reason is that the vegetable growth is but the em- 
bodiment of the soils, one furnishing rich iron and 
sulphur deposits, the other destitute of them. 

The breeder, if he would be successful, will do well 
to consider his location and furnish artificially that 
which is lacking in his soil. " From dust to dust" 
is true of all things, and it behooves us to see of what 
kind of dust we build our chickens. 

The best doctors are those who watch the patient 
while well, and prevent sickness, instead of waiting for 
symptoms and then doctoring them (the expectant 
plan, so called), and finds his remedies in the regulation 
of the diet. 

So the breeder best takes care of his flock who 
keeps a watchful eye upon them while at roost. If the 
droppings from it show a costive tendency then feed 
freely of vegetables, such as boiled potatoes, turnips, 
or cabbage mashed with bran and meal while hot. If 



POULTRY CULTURE. 151 

the droppings show a relaxed tendency, then cease 
giving vegetables, and resort to baked johnny-cake, 
corn, and tincture of iron. Sour or sweet milk is one 
of the best things to feed poultry at all times. Fowls 
thus carefully fed are seldom sick, unless it be that they 
have what we term the " distemper." 

DISTEMPER. 

This disease all chickens are heir to, and it generally 
takes them about the time they are from twenty-two to 
twenty-six weeks old, and at the time they are shedding 
their second chicken feathers, preparatory to putting 
on their freedom suits, so to speak. 

If carefully watched little or no medicine is needed, 
and so light is the disease that it hardly deserves a 
place in this catalogue, yet if not jealously watched it 
becomes the most fruitful in the introduction of roup 
and consumption. 

Symptoms. —A listless, quiet mien, a disposition to 
remain on the roost in the day-time, face and comb 
quite red, and a puff or fullness of the face under the 
eye. The second day a white froth is discernible in 
the corner of the eye. A decided loss of appetite is 
also noticeable. 

Treatment. — If noticed, and the disease taken in 
hand before the appearance of the froth in the eye, it 
will usually only be necessary to wash the head and 
beak clean, and blow down through the nose into the 
throat either with the mouth or by means of a rubber 
nipple, thus clearing the tear tube, and bathe the head 
and wash the throat with a solution of carbolic acid— 
one part acid to ten parts water. The birds should be 



152 POULTRY CULTURE. 

kept in a quiet place and allowed nothing but water, in 
which place three grains of bromide of potassium per 
day. The best way to administer it, if the fowl will 
drink of its own accord, is to apportion its water to 
what it will take in the day. In this way they take it 
homceopathically. But if dumpish — neither eating nor 
drinking of their own volition — then administer the 
dose in a pill of soft bread, inject, by means of a crown 
bottom oil dripper, kerosene oil into the nostrils. A 
still better way is by the use of a crooked nozzle rubber 
syringe, placing the point in the cleft of the roof of 
the mouth and syringe the nasal passage clear, when 
the action of the oil will be to allay the inflammation. 
One treatment is sufficient in three-fourths of the cases. 
It seems to run about three days, when they regain 
their usual appearance of health , many have it so 
light as not to be noticed. In aggravated cases, where 
the face is swollen and eyes become watery from the 
closing by inflammation of the tear tubes, the head 
and throat should be thoroughly steamed by the use 
of a large sponge and hot water. The tear tube should 
be cleared (as before explained), a dessertspoonful of 
castor oil given, and the bathing of the face and throat 
with the solution of carbolic acid continued at short 
intervals. 

This distemper maybe called a cold or the incipient 
stages of the roup. We will not quarrel about names, 
but simply say that in our opinion it is no more roup 
than a cold is measles. There is no offensive smell to 
the breath as in roup, but if neglected it will excite 
roup. We have not the slightest doubt of this ; in 
fe.*t. know it to be the case, and the breeder has the 



POULTRY CULTURE. 153 

choice of adopting the adage, " A stitch in time saves 
nine," and attending to this mild, easily-managed dis- 
temper, or to neglect it and have that scourge of a 
poultry house — THE ROUP — to contend with. 

ROUP. 

When roup appears our advice is to kill the affected 
one and turn your attention at once to the flock, giving 
sulphur in the ratio of a tablespoonful to fifteen fowls 
every other day for a week, feeding tincture of iron, 
eight drops to a hen every day in their soft food, 
which will pay to be boiled rice, until treatment is over. 
With this be sure that the ventilation is complete and 
free from direct drafts upon the fowls. For the benefit 
of those who w T ish to cure the disease we give the fol- 
lowing symptoms and our method of treatment : 

Symptoms. — Swelling of the head, watery discharges 
from the eyes and nostrils, which are very fetid and 
offensive to the smell, following which these dis- 
charges become acrid and result in a congealed yellow 
coating to the mouth and tongue, called canker — 
which we term a poisonous fungus growth in the 
blood. 

Treatment. — Wash and steam the head and throat 
with hot water in which a dash of carbolic acid is 
added. Clear the nasal passage to ■ throat by an 
injection of carbolic water, one part carbolic acid to ten 
parts of water, or by the use of kerosene oil and the 
crooked syringe, as spoken of in distemper. Gargle 
the throat with kerosene oil three mornings running, 
when all the canker of throat and mouth will generally 
cleave off, leaving the mouth and throat red but clean. 



154 POULTRY CULTURE. 

We have seen cruel though ignorant people remove 
this canker of the mouth with a stick or nail. All this 
kind of treatment but aggravates the disease. Give a 
dessertspoonful of castor oil, and follow with a gill of 
milk in which two grains of bromide of potassium has 
been dissolved, night and morning. 

The milk can be easily administered by taking the 
bird by the under beak and drawing the neck upward 
till straight, when the milk poured from a tea-pot will 
run into the crop without the effort Of swallowing. 

At the end of about four or five days the effect of 
the bromide in the blood, and the solution of carbolic 
acid as a bath, and the kerosene as a gargle, may be 
seen in the sloughing off of the cankerous substance 
from the tongue and mouth, when the fowl will 
commence to mend. The treatment at this stage 
should be nourishing food, with occasional doses of 
sulphur, and the fowls will regain their health and 
sprightliness. In some cases the bromide seems to fail 
in overcoming the poison in the blood. We have used 
Fowler's solution, cne drop a day, and in a week seen 
the birds commence to mend, but when the disease 
hangs on for a long time we think it poor policy to 
breed from such, for we find such birds susceptible to 
colds. They have become so debilitated that their 
recuperation, and the watching for a long time before 
they will lay, makes the hatchet a better means of 
eradicating the disease in those isolated cases. 

CHICKEN POX (OR "DRY ROUP"). 

Symptoms. — An eruption of the comb, face and 
wattles, raised and warty in appearance, and in color a 




White Face Black Spanish. 



155 



POULTRY CULTURE. 157 

yellowish white. When the crests are removed, these 
warty substances resemble a bunch of tiny spiles set 
into the flesh. They bleed profusely. 

Treatment. — Remove the birds from the flock, and 
touch the crowns of their pustules with citric ointment 
and allow them to dry down to a black scab, which will 
be ripe in about seventy-two hours, when, if lifted off, 
will take with it the little white roots of the disease, 
from one-sixteenth to one-eighth cf an inch in length. 
Give each morning for four days a pill made as follows: 
Tablespoonful of common flour, tablespoonful of flour 
of sulphur, twenty grains cayenne pepper, twenty-five 
to twenty-eight drops "Fowler's solution." (If the 
Fowler's solution cannot be had, use sixty grains of 
bromide of potassium instead.) Mix with cream, and 
make into twenty pills. 

Dissolve four grains of quinine in half a pint of 
milk, giving half in the morning and half at evening ; 
feed while treating, boiled onions mashed with oatmeal 
and boiled rice. If the disease attacks the eyes so as to 
close them and prevent their eating make the food into 
pellets half the size of one's little finger, which, if 
dipped in milk and the bird held as described in roup, 
will slip down the throat readily. 

If the sulphur acts too powerfully upon the bowels 
scald the milk given, which will check its influence on 
the bowels and cause it to work more strongly in the 
blood. The disease is so like the " yaws," described by 
Dr. Quinn, we are of the opinion that it is a kindred 
one, if not the same. 

Roup sometimes accompanies it, but they are not 
alike. This has a run, and requires from five to seven 



158 POULTRY CULTURE. 

days to treat it. We tried specimens of a strong con- 
stitution by giving milk and water, and without treat- 
ment, which recovered. It is very contagious, and on 
its first appearance kill the specimen afflicted, and by 
the use of vegetables, sulphur and iron treat your flock 
to check its spreading. Cleanse the house in which the 
disease appears as thoroughly as you would a house 
that had been visited by small-pox. It is, like that, a 
cutaneous disease. 

DIPHTHERIA. 

We give to this new and very fatal disease the above 
name on account of its symptoms. 

Symptoms. — The face and throat become exceed- 
ingly red and inflamed ; so much so, that if cold water 
is applied it will evaporate in steam on account of the 
heat produced by the inflammation. Six hours after 
this feverish appearance in the throat and face the 
throat becomes coated with a yellowish leathery lining, 
which may be removed by putting down the throat a 
compressed sponge, liberating it and withdrawing it, 
when it will take up the coating, leaving the surface of 
the throat a whitish red, thickly studded with minute 
raw spots from which this poison fungus growth seems 
to exude. 

If the throat be left without sponging out more 
than six hours the coating will adhere to the throat in 
the same manner as the canker does in roup. 

Diarrhoea attends the disease, the discharges resem- 
bling a mixture of oil, snuff and chrome green paint. 

Exhaustion is very great, so much so that we have 
given a cock of twelve pounds weight two ounces of 



POULTRY CULTURE. 159 

brandy with two ounces of milk in the morning and he 
showed no evidence of intoxication whatever. 

Treatment. — Steam the head and throat with hot 
water to which a little carbolic acid has been added, 
and sponge the throat as described in roup, also gargle 
the throat with kerosene oil, or still better, the follow- 
ing recipe : Sulpho carbolate soda, sixty grains ; glyc- 
erine, cinnamon water, of each two tablespoonfuls. 
Give a small teaspoonful three times daily, and gargle 
the throat as above with a teaspoonful of the following 
mixture in a half glass of water: 

^ — Saturated solution of chlorate potash 4 tablespoonfuls. 

Tincture chloride iron , 1 teaspoonful. 

Then touch the most prominent spots with a camel's 
hair pencil, dipped in the above. 

To keep up the strength during treatment add a 
beaten egg to a goblet of milk with a tablespoonful of 
brandy in which previously dissolve three grains of 
quinine, giving a third, morning, noon and night. 

When the eruption we have called chicken-pox ac- 
companied the disease, it seemed to act as a counter- 
irritant, and more fowls recovered when thus afflicted, 
than when troubled with the throat disease alone. 

In the light of our experience we should not try to 
save a single specimen, but should kill and bury them 
at once, and attend to the sanitary condition of the re- 
mainder of the flock, by giving Fowler's Solution at the 
rate of one drop to a fowl in the water and continue it 
for eight or ten days. 

Should this disease visit one in the form of an epi- 
demic, it would be no less, and we are fearful, much 
more fatal than chicken chol 



160 POULTRY CULTURE. 



BUMBLE-FOOT. 



This disease is in very many cases caused by care- 
lessness. Flying down from high roosts to a floor 
which is always more or less covered by small gravel 
stones results in bruises that are precisely like what 
we usually call "stone-galls." 

The flesh of the foot being so tough, the pus can- 
not escape, therefore, if not attended to, it must coi% 
geal, and an ungainly, troublesome foot be the result. 

The fowl goes lame, and careless of its comfort, we 
in nine cases in ten fail to investigate in time to pre- 
vent serious trouble. When discovered before the 
pus congeals, lance the swelling at the rear of the 
foot, and the pressure upon it in walking will press 
the pus out and there will be a much smaller callous 
than if allowed to settle down of its own accord. 

We have treated cases by making an incision in 
front and rear of foot, and those on shank by opening 
at top and bottom, and by the use of a syringe and a 
solution of carbolic acid, of one part of acid to ten 
parts of water, cleanse them thoroughly, when they all 
heal up. 

In most cases we are not aware of the trouble till 
the pus is congealed, when it is almost impossible to 
press it out unless we take with it some portion of the 
layers of the foot, which would be worse for the fowl 
than to use a strong liniment to take out the soreness, 
and let the inflammation settle down into a corn. 

When the swellings are upon the shank or knee- 
joints, which are generally the result of rheumatism or 



POULTRY CULTURE. 161 

gout, the fowl may as well go to the block, for it is a 
doubtful policy to breed from such a specimen. 

But some have a mania for doctoring, in which case 
use strong liniment, and bind the shanks and joints in 
leaves or bulbs of the skunk cabbage, and give inter- 
nally, one drop each morning, of Fowler's Solution, 
for a month, or bromide of potassium, three grains 
per day, until the trouble is cured. 

Bumble-foot may be prevented in a great degree by 
providing low roosts and keeping the floor of the fowl- 
house covered three inches deep with loamy sand, 
which costs less than to doctor fowls for the want of it. 

THE RED SPIDER LOUSE. 

This pest is the scourge of the poultry-house, and 
the source of more trouble and annoyance than any 
other hindrance to poultry keeping. The quarters 
often become literally alive with them before the 
breeder is aware of their presence. They sap the life 
blood from the fowls and reduce to skeletons and de- 
bilitate a flock to such an extent as to make the sea- 
son unprofitable. Working only in the night, they 
escape notice and have things their own way. 

Fowls that are sitting upon eggs are generally the 
greatest sufferers, for these lice instinctively seek out 
such hens as are about to hatch their broods, and many 
a hen sacrifices her life to her motherhood. 

In this case the hen becomes sallow in face and 
comb — actually bloodless, the lice having consumed 
the blood to such an extent as to cause death, and 
many fowls, whose death has been attributed to dis- 
ease, have been murdered by these pests. 



162 POULTRY CULTURE. 

The quarters should be constantly watched, and all 
the cracks and knots on or about the roosts saturated 
with coal tar and kerosene oil, or carbolic acid. The 
houses must be kept free from them, for the exhaustive 
influence of these marauders not only entails the loss 
of blood to the fowls, but, by reducing their strength, 
renders the flock more liable to the diseases we have 
described. 

It is therefore the best and surest step toward ward- 
ing off disease to have an absolutely clean poultry- 
house. If from one to three pounds of sulphur be 
mixed with the loamy sand and gravel covering the 
floor, in which the fowls may dust themselves, and 
kerosene oil used as described, the fowls occasionally 
dusted while on their roosts with a dredging box filled 
with sulphur and Persian insect powder, or carbolic 
powder, their quarters will be cleansed. Cleanliness 
coupled with judicious feeding is what makes fowls 
profitable. So great a nervous irritant are these species 
of vermin that in cwo flocks equally well fed the 
flock which occupies quarters infested with lice will not 
lay at all, while those free from this annoyance will lay 
nearly every day. This fact proves them to be an ex- 
pensive enemy to the poulterer. 

We do not go so far as some writers and say that 
all disease is caused by lice, but will say that many a 
fowl would not have suffered disease were it not for 
this barn or spider louse. Breeders, look for them at 
all times. Do not wait for them to make themselves 
Jaiown, and force their acquaintance upon you. 



POULTRY CULTURE. 163 



DIARRHCEA. 

This is most liable to attack chickens under two 
weeks old, and fowls during incubation, unless one is 
careful as to the diet given. 

In chickens, scalded milk as drink, keeping water 
from them, will usually correct the evil, but sometimes 
it seems to visit the yard to a degree almost equivalent 
to cholera. Discharges resemble oil and snuff mixed, 
with green streaks through it. The fowl shows great 
exhaustion, and moves about to all appearance as if no 
muscles were moved but those of the legs. 

Treatment. — For setting hens we have used one 
tablespoonful of the following mixture in a quart of 
water, giving them no other drink till cured. 

Sweet Tincture Rhubarb 2 oz. 

Paregoric 4 oz. 

Bicarbonate Soda \ oz. 

Essence Peppermint 1 dr. 

Water 2 oz. 

Mix. 

With young chicks, if the scalded milk failed to cor- 
rect the evil, put one teaspoonful of the above mixture 
in one half-pint of the milk. 

Care should be taken to discontinue the treatment 
when a cure is effected, as one extreme is as much to 
be avoided as the other. 

In the event of a stubborn case in adult birds put 
one teaspoonful of Squibbs' Diarrhoea Mixture in a pint 
of water and give as a drink, and generally a cure will 
follow in from twenty-four to forty-eight hours. 



164 POULTRY CULTURE. 

You will see by the formula that this is a very power- 
ful medicine, and much care should be employed in 
its use : 

B 

Laudanum , i oz. 

Tincture Capsicum i oz. 

Tincture Camphor I oz. 

Chloroform — pure 3 dr. 

Alcohol . 5 dr. 

Mix. 

If fruit cans are used as drinking vessels they should 
be discarded when they commence to corrode, as the 
rust is an oxide of tin, and in many cases brings on 
diarrhoea. Many a valuable bird has been lost in this 
way under the erroneous idea that they were getting 
iron and consequently strength, for where oxide of 
iron may do no harm oxide of tin is poisonous. 




^ N ]2 



